Deploying multiple grails applications with Apache/Tomcat + Virtual Hosts

Question

I haven't been able to figure out how to deploy multiple grails applications with Apache/Tomcat where a virtual host is mapped to each grails app

I can get it so that

http://virtualhost1.example.com/myGrailsApplication-0.1/

works, but what I want is for

http://virtualhost1.example.com/

to go directly to my application. A lot of tutorial sites on the web just have you make your web app the "ROOT" one, but that won't work in a mutiple grails-app virtual host environment.

I tried using the

<Host name="virtualhost1.example.com" ...> </Host>

tags in the tomcat/conf/server.xml file, but it didn't seem to do anything (and, yes, I restarted tomcat each time I changed it.)

I also tried everything I could think of in my apache config file for the virtual host, and couldn't get it to work.

So, how can I get rid of the app name in the URL when I have multiple grails webapps, virtual hosts, and I don't want my webapp to be "ROOT"?

Answer 1

I'm assuming that you are using mod_jk to connect Apache & Tomcat. If so, You will have to have to configure virtual hosting within Tomcat as well as Apache (multiple <Host> declarations in your conf/server.xml)

This basically means that you'll have two <Host ...> declarations within conf/server.xml. They will have different names, and appBase, but you will still have to name the war ROOT.war

The example that they gave was:

<Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="ren">
    <Host name="ren"    appBase="renapps"/>
    <Host name="stimpy" appBase="stimpyapps"/>
</Engine>

After you've configured the DNS of your virtual '<host>s'(much like Apache) you'll have to put your ROOT.war(s) into separate folders {renapps,stimpyapps} instead of the default 'webapps' folder

This method works, but there is another method using mod_proxy instead of mod_jk. I'm not that familiar with mod_proxy but basically you would have the connector handle translating the root context to the actual context. So after its configured it would proxy & forward requests sent to http://virtualhost1.example.com/ to the right context within Tomcat (/myGrailsApplication-0.1/)

Let us know what you find! Anyone else do this with mod_proxy?