Question

What is the smartest way to configure Tomcat to have two localhost instances?

Please note that I do not have admin rights to the system, and so don’t have access to the /etc/hosts file. I would love to be able to do something like the following, but can’t modify my /etc/hosts files:
http://juststuffreally.blogspot.com/2007/03/enabling-multiple-localhost-sites-in.html

I’d like to have something like this, so that my instances of localhost would look as follows:

keith.localhost.com
joe.localhost.com

…but I can’t modify my /etc/hosts file =-(

Another resource that I found was this, but this gives instruction for multiple outside domains–I need multiple localhost instances:
http://iam-rakesh.blogspot.com/2009/10/hosting-multiple-domains-in-tomcat.html

Any ideas?

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

You can run multiple instances of tomcat on multiple ports. You would need a unique server.xml for each instance, and each one would need different ports defined in the appropriate <Server> and <Connector> elements.

Once everything is set up, you would specify an explicit port when connecting to the instance, e.g.:

- http://localhost:8080/
- http://localhost:8081/

This document covers the process in a little more detail.