tomcat - Tomcat home directory environment variable

Question

I'm currently editing the server.xml context paths and want to have a context path back to the original webapps directory. Is there an built in tomcat environment variable that points back to the tomcat installation directory like TOMCAT_HOME or something?

Answer 1

As pointed out in the comments, the Tomcat installation directory is available as ${catalina.home} property, while the Tomcat instance root directory through ${catalina.base} (cf. Tomcat documentation). E.g. you can use ${catalina.home}/webapps/manager for the location of the Tomcat Manager application.

However I wouldn't define the contexts for Tomcat Manager and other applications in server.xml: they have their own context definitions in the META-INF/context.xml file of their folder, so they probably should not be redefined in server.xml: this way you can loose some important configuration attributes (like privileged="true" for Tomcat Manager).

A better solution would be to copy those definitions into conf/Catalina/localhost/<appname>.xml and add the docBase="${catalina.home}/webapps/<appname> attribute. E.g. for Tomcat Manager you should create a file named conf/Catalina/localhost/manager.xml with content:

<Context docBase="${catalina.home}/webapps/manager" antiResourceLocking="false" privileged="true" >
  <CookieProcessor className="org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Rfc6265CookieProcessor"
                   sameSiteCookies="strict" />
  <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteAddrValve"
         allow="127\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+|::1|0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1" />
  <Manager sessionAttributeValueClassNameFilter="java\.lang\.(?:Boolean|Integer|Long|Number|String)|org\.apache\.catalina\.filters\.CsrfPreventionFilter\$LruCache(?:\$1)?|java\.util\.(?:Linked)?HashMap"/>
</Context>