Is there a way to enforce a deployment order in tomcat6?

Question

I have 3 wars in my webapp folder. Two of them are built on services of the third one. I\'m in a testing environment, i.e. I don\'t have control over their architectures, so

Answer 1

There are three ways to deploy the webapp.war in Tomcat.

1. Add Context element inside a Host element in the $CATALINA_BASE/conf/server.xml file.

2. Create the $CATALINA_BASE/conf/[engineName]/[hostName]/[webappName].xml file with content:

3. Add the webapp.war file directly in the $CATALINA_BASE/webapps/ directory.

The following deployment sequence will occur on Tomcat startup:

1→2→3

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Some explanations：

• $CATALINA_BASE

  Refer the base directory against which most relative paths are resolved. If you have not configured Tomcat for multiple instances by setting a CATALINA_BASE directory, then $CATALINA_BASE will be set to the value of $CATALINA_HOME, the directory into which you have installed Tomcat.

• docBase

  The pathname to the web application WAR file. You may specify an absolute pathname for this WAR file, or a pathname that is relative to the appBase directory of the owning Host.

• engineName:

  The name of the engine associated to the context. The default name is Catalina.

• hostName:

  The name of the host associated to the context. The default name is localhost.

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Assume that:

• there are 3 webapps: a.war, b.war and c.war.
• b.war depends on a.war.
• c.war depends on b.war.
• Server.Service.Engine.name = "Catalina"
• Server.Service.Engine.Host.name = "localhost"
• Server.Service.Engine.Host.appBase = "webapps"

Try the following steps:

1. Put all of the war files to the $CATALINA_BASE/webapps/ directory.

2. create the $CATALINA_BASE/conf/Catalina/localhost/b.xml file with content:

3. Add Context element in the $CATALINA_BASE/conf/server.xml file:

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Reference:

• https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-9.0-doc/deployer-howto.html
• http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-9.0-doc/config/context.html