Comments on: Following symbolic links in Tomcat

By: Eze

Eze — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:10:32 +0000

Just so you know, you can do this for all webapps by editing the context.xml in /etc/tomcat6/ (in Ubuntu)

… more stuff here …

By: knightBreed

knightBreed — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 02:51:59 +0000

What about webapps that use struts and/or spring? These do not have a traditional layout, i.e. there will not be a single context.xml file to modify…

By: sprokkie

sprokkie — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 10:47:02 +0000

i think i will make a cron to copy to rsync the file into the ROOT folder
that should work

By: DenisH

DenisH — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 10:14:24 +0000

Sorry, I’m running out of ideas. Is there any chance you could set up a vanilla installation of Tomcat 6 somewhere else and create a brand new single app and then step by step ensure you’ve got a context.xml file for the new app, then add allowLinking, then add a link? That would check that your version of Tomcat does support it and that you’re setting up the symbolic link correctly?

Other than that, I don’t know what to suggest

By: sprokkie

sprokkie — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 10:03:22 +0000

I made a symbolic link in the test folder to a file.
It still did not work.

The server.xml is very complicated,
I addes the line with allowlinking to another file it is called
aplicationcontect.xml then the aplication did not work anymore

i ran out of context.xml file’s ….

By: DenisH

DenisH — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 09:30:12 +0000

Right, if you have 3 context.xml files, you need to be careful to see which one is being used. I wouldn’t modify all of them. I would be tempted to rename them out of the way one at a time until you find it doesn’t work any more. (If you find it does still work, have a look in server.xml and other config files in case there are even more references to your app).

Once you’ve found the appropriate context.xml, you can add allowLinking=”true” and test before and after to see if there is any difference. If you put a symbolic link to a file inside the test folder that works, does link work there? That’s how I use it. I have a bunch of applications that all share the same admin pages, so I have a symbolic link to the admin directory which is outside each of the individual apps.

By: sprokkie

sprokkie — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 09:14:14 +0000

I did a “file find” on context.xml
I found 3 file’s in each file i added the allowLinking=true line.

i run mango on this tomcat server. http://mango.serotoninsoftware.com/

Other folders are accesable.
i made a folder called test and put a file in that folder
it was accesable with the browser.
The folder that is the symbolic link is not accesable

What could i try more ?

By: DenisH

DenisH — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 08:43:32 +0000

Hi Sprokkie,

You’d have to give us a bit more info. Do you know if it’s finding the context.xml file? (You could check this by setting some other property and then checking to see if it is set, have a look at http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/config/context.html to give you ideas of what you could change.)

Then next try pointing at a directory that isn’t symbolic and check that works, then if it does, change it to the symbolic link and see if it stops working.

You should probably ensure there aren’t any other context.xml files that take priority over the one you’re setting up. Again, check the link above as it explains the order that Tomcat uses to find these.

Good luck!

By: sprokkie

sprokkie — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 08:41:28 +0000

the line is ( see above)

context allowLinking=”true”

i cannot use the real line, id did that but it wil not display here

By: sprokkie

sprokkie — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:30:08 +0000

I tried to get the symbolic link working on my tomcat 6.0.20
in my context.xml file i only have this line

The context.xml is located in:
/home/user/apache-tomcat-6.0.30/webapps/hostmanager/meta-inf

any one an idea why this is not working

cheers
Sprokkie