Externalizing Tomcat webapp config from .war file

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Your tomcat/conf/Catalina/<host> can contain context descriptors that let you configure lots of things including defining “environment entries”, which are accessible from Java via JNDI. There are lots of ways to go about using it. Personally, I set an environment entry which is the file system path to my properties file. My app is built to check for this entry, and if it doesn’t exist, look for the file on the classpath instead. That way, in dev, we have the dev properties right there on the classpath, but when we build and deploy, we point it to an external file.

There’s good documentation for configuring a context on the Tomcat website. See the Defining a Context section on details of how to create the file and where to put it.

As an example, if your host is named myHost and your app is a war file named myApp.war in the webapps directory, then you could create tomcat/conf/Catalina/myHost/myApp.xml with this content:

<Context>
    <Environment name="configurationPath" value="/home/tomcat/myApp.properties" type="java.lang.String"/>
</Context>

Then from your code, you’d do a JNDI lookup on java:comp/env/configurationPath (95% certainty here) to get that string value.

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