How to use relative paths without including the context root name?

Question

To working my static file (CSS, JS) I have to write absolute path like /AppName/templates/style/main.css. Is there any solution, that I could write relative pat

Answer 1

If your actual concern is the dynamicness of the webapp context (the "AppName" part), then just retrieve it dynamically by HttpServletRequest#getContextPath().

    
    
    


    link

If you want to set a base path for all relative links so that you don't need to repeat ${pageContext.request.contextPath} in every relative link, use the tag. Here's an example with help of JSTL functions.

<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>
<%@ taglib prefix="fn" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/functions" %>
...

    ${pageContext.request.requestURL}
    
    
    
    


    link

This way every relative link (i.e. not starting with / or a scheme) will become relative to the .

This is by the way not specifically related to Tomcat in any way. It's just related to HTTP/HTML basics. You would have the same problem in every other webserver.

See also:

• Browser can't access/find relative resources like CSS, images and links when calling a Servlet which forwards to a JSP
• Is it recommended to use the html tag?