Question

Basic question is do we need to run our war as ROOT.war to get the context path correct with spring security?

Background:

We have a grails application that is using spring security plugin. It is proxied by nginx and the war is NOT running as ROOT.war in tomcat.

Web site: https://www.example.com
Login: https://www.example.com/login

War name is foo.war and nginx is proxying requests to http://tomcat:8080/foo

Spring security is using: ${request.contextPath}

Do we install the app as a ROOT.war or is there a context path variable in grails spring security that we can modify?

The spring security auth cookies are being set with /foo in the path … and our session management in not working correctly.

Answer 1

@Ian-Roberts is correct.

You cannot just use grails.app.context = '/foo' or grails.app.context = '/'. I appears that Tomcat is messing with the applications context, ergo you have to run it as ROOT.war.

Instructions:

• You do need grails.app.context = '/' in Config.groovy in order to do grails run-app
• grails war ROOT.war
• copy your war file into ROOT.war in your tomcat webapps folder.
• create a ROOT.xml file

ROOT.xml in $TOMCAT_CONF/Catalina/localhost

<Context path="" antiResourceLocking="false" privileged="true" >
                  <Resource name="jdbc/****x" 
              auth="Container" 
              type="javax.sql.DataSource"
              maxActive="300" 
             edited :)
              />
           <Resource name="jdbc/***" 
              auth="Container" 
             edited :)
            />
</Context>

Because I was getting URL Mapping Errors. Oh and do not try to run the war outside of the AppBase, because tomcat will not expand it and all hell will break out 🙂