Deploying exploded war with symlinks

[gkushida]

I am running into an issue deploying an exploded warfile which contains symlinks. This works with standalone Tomcat, but not with JBoss 4.0.2 + embedded Tomcat 5.5 (on RedHat Enterprise 4, JDK 1.5_06).

My exploded war directory contains a symlink to a WEB-INF directory. The TomcatDeployer deploys the webapp, but the ContextConfig cannot find the web.xml file, so it uses the default web.xml and the war's servlets don't get deployed. I get this error:

15:07:45,935 INFO [ContextConfig] Missing application web.xml, using defaults only StandardEngine[jboss.web].StandardHost[localhost].StandardContext[/wfm]

Normally you'd fix this by adding a DefaultContext element within the Host of the tomcat config file (deploy/jbossweb-tomcat55.sar/server.xml):

<DefaultContext allowLinking="true"/>

Unfortunately this does not work - the allowLinking attribute does not get propagated to the Catalina context. The JMX Mbean view of the deployed web app shows that the 'allowLinking' attribute is false - editing the MBean view throws an InvocationTargetException.

I also tried adding the allowLinking attribute to the default context file (deploy/jbossweb-tomcat55.sar/context.xml), but that did not work either.

So far, the answers I've found involve editing server.xml (which did not seem to work), or adding additional paths for deployment discovery (which i don't want). Also I don't care about portability - this is a UNIX-only app.

All of this works with standalone tomcat, so it looks like either a configuration problem or a bug in the tomcat/jboss deployer code. Any ideas? Thanks...

[yeroc]

Did you every find a solution for this problem? We're running into the exact same issue.

Corey

[lmellis85]

I am also running into the same issue, was there any fix for this?

[allenplee]

Hi, I know it's been a while since this thread was updated but I found the answer to this question at the following link:

     http://www.weask.us/tag/configure-symlinks-single-directory-tomcat

Here is the solution posted over there (in case that site goes away):

Create a context.xml file in a WEB-INF directory in your web app containing:  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>  <Context path="/myapp" allowLinking="true">  </Context>   more here: http://www.isocra.com/2008/01/following-symbolic-links-in-tomcat/   There are a few problems with the solution of creating a WEB-INF/context.xml that contains   The biggest issue is that if a conf/context.xml exists, the allowLinking in the  there takes precedence ...

Hope this helps someone else who encountered what I overcame today.