Question

I want to use ant install to deploy (and re-deploy and re-deploy) my webapp on a local virtualhost.

It works fine with the default host, but the virtual host does not have the manager webapp. I would like to use similar setup in the live enviromnet (no manager on the given host).

I found a promisiong property:

webapp.virtual.host=...

in some example build.properties, but it does not seem to get the job done. Is it even possible, and how?

Answer 1

In my answer to one SO post, Christian Semrau commented:

In standard configuration, Tomcat
monitors its webapps folder and
deploys any webapp for which you copy
a .war file into the webapps folder,
and undeploys it if you remove the
.war file, and re-deploys it when you
change the .war file. But when doing
that, you don’t get automatic feedback
about the success of a deployment,
which you do get from the Tomcat
Manager.

That said, your task becomes as easy as copying or removing the file on the remote server.

Yet, I still don’t understand why having manager app is a problem. You could, for example, only deploy it on different host/port:

<Connector port="8080" address="main.ip.add.ress">
  ...
  <Context path="/your_main_context">
  ...
  </Context>
</Connector>

<Connector port="18080" address="another.ip.add.ress">
  ...
  <Context path="/manager">
  ...
  </Context>
</Connector>

and put relevant firewall restrictions. Or, alternatively, you could place

<Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteHostValve"
     allow=".*\.mycompany\.com|www\.yourcompany\.com"/>      

inside Context and achieve similar results.