Virtual Hosts with Tomcat + Mod JK

Question

I have set up Apache and Tomcat on my system and I want to combine both using Mod_JK. I have created a mod_jk worker (ajp13_worker) and added a virtual host to my Apache config:

<VirtualHost *:80> ServerName tomcat.mydomain.com DocumentRoot /usr/local/tomcat/webapps/ # Tomcat JkMount /* ajp13_worker JkMount /*.jsp ajp13_worker JkMount /*.jspx ajp13_worker </VirtualHost> 

and it works fine, I end up on the default Tomcat page. The Manager applications are working fine too.

Next, I have my application, which sits in the PATH-TO-TOMCAT/webapps/myapp folder. It should be reachable under myapp.mydomain.com, so I added a second vhost, this time with "DocumentRoot /usr/local/tomcat/webapps/myapp". But it did not work: I always landed on the default Tomact page and not in the root of my app. So I used ModRewite, to rewite the request to the context of my app. The Apache vhost looks like this:

<VirtualHost *:80> ServerName myapp.mydomain.com DocumentRoot /usr/local/tomcat/webapps/myapp/ RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/myapp/.* RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /myapp/$1 [PT] # Tomcat JkMount /* ajp13_worker JkMount /*.jsp ajp13_worker JkMount /*.jspx ajp13_worker </VirtualHost> 

That vhost works, the requests are rewritten and my app is reachable under myapp.mydomain.com But now, my Tomcat creates for every single request a new session and the session count explodes when a few users access the page.

I tried several tutorials, but most of them did not address this issue. I think I am missing something. Could someone explain to me how virtual hosts are correctly set up in the combination Apache/Tomcat/Mod-JK?

Thanks a lot,

Claude

Answer 1

Ok, I found it. In the Tomcat sever.xml, you can specify the context path for each host:

<Host name="app.mydomain.com" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true"> <Context path="" docBase="PATH-TO-TOMCAT/webapps/app"/> </Host> 

My mistake was, that I always tried to modify the appBase parameter and did not know about the Context element!