Question

I have a web app that I run locally in tomcat and which I have also deployed to Cloudbees. However, I am having some problems with cloudbees using a virtual host versus my local tomcat using a context path.

I access my local tomcat app via

• http://localhost:8080/SpringMVC

In cloudbees, I access it via

• http://springmvc.shaunabram.cloudbees.net

So far so good, but the problem is when I try to do a submit. Locally, this submits successfully to

• http://localhost:8080/SpringMVC/HelloWorld

But on cloudbees, it tries (and fails) to submit to

• http://springmvc.shaunabram.cloudbees.net/SpringMVC/HelloWorld

If I manually modify the browser URL to

• http://springmvc.shaunabram.cloudbees.net/HelloWorld

it all works fine.

I saw a similar problem posted here, but the suggested solution was to

1. update the web.xml to use the prefix path (e.g. I think
   /SpringMVC in my case), but this would break my local tomcat version, or
2. deploy the app as an EAR file with an application.xml – but
   migrating to an EE container like tomcat EE or JBoss will be a much
   bigger task.

I had thought the solution might be to use the CloudBees Web Configuration File to somehow configure the app to use (something like) http://springmvc.shaunabram.cloudbees.net/SpringMVC as my base url, but I can’t see any examples of that (all CloudBees Web Configuration File examples seem to be used for environment specific DataSources).

Any help greatly appreciated!

Shaun

Answer 1

Web application should never use absolute path and always build URL using ServletContext.getContextPath(). I wonder you hit this issue, assuming you use SpringMVC that handles this for you.

Or maybe you hard-coded some resources path, but should use to generate the adequate path, or a scriptlet to append context Path :

<c:url value="/style.css" var="url" />
<link rel="stylesheet" href="${url}" type="text/css">

or

<link rel="stylesheet" href="${pageContext.request.contextPath}/style.css" type="text/css">

see also Spring MVC Request URLs in JSP