Question

I deploy 3 WAR files using Ant scripts and stop and start tomcat using startup/shutdown.sh . When I do a shutdown.sh, the Tomcat process does not die. If I forget to do a “lsof -i :8080” followed by a kill , then, tomcat still starts but firefox does not load the page. Why does Tomcat not die gracefully ?

2nd problem : Earlier I used to use Eclipse to handle the start/stop of Tomcat server. In the event of making an update to a js file , inside WebContent, just starting the site in debug=true mode used to suffice. But now, when using Tomcat from command line, I have to regenerate the WAR file and then restart Tomcat for changes to take effect. Why is this so ?

Relevant parts of my conf/server.xml file :

<Host appBase="/home/local/deploy/eclipse/webapps" autoDeploy="true" name="localhost" unpackWARs="true">

        <!-- SingleSignOn valve, share authentication between web applications
             Documentation at: /docs/config/valve.html -->
        <!--
        <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.authenticator.SingleSignOn" />
        -->

        <!-- Access log processes all example.
             Documentation at: /docs/config/valve.html
             Note: The pattern used is equivalent to using pattern="common" -->
        <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve" directory="logs" pattern="%h %l %u %t &quot;%r&quot; %s %b" prefix="localhost_access_log." resolveHosts="false" suffix=".txt"/>

Yes, I haven’t set the context paths explicitly as autoDeploy was true and Tomcat does it for me. So . Could that be an issue ?

Answer 1

Your first problem isn’t so clear, and indeed happens with me often. Sometimes I have to just issue a kill -9. It could be because Tomcat is somehow holding on to an important container thread that is active.

The second problem is a bit easier. If you are using a tomcat instance that is external to your eclipse installation, you will not be able to “easily” leverage some hot deploy features. The way you were doing it in the past, you were more than likely making use of the eclipse wst plugin. This allows a tomcat container to run and be managed within eclipse.

Whenever you deploy an application to the eclipse wst tomcat instance, you are actually deploying it to a plugin folder that mirrors tomcat.

The plugin folder is usually located at $eclispe_home/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclispe.wst.server.core/tmp0/wtpwebapps.

If you are using an external tomcat instance and do not have it linked to eclipse, you have a completely isolated environment and all your changes will have to be pushed out to tomcat either manually or by creating some sort of builder process.