How to config Tomcat to serve images from an external folder outside webapps? [duplicate]

Question

How can i use Tomcat to serve image files from a public folder outside webapps? I dont want to use a 2nd Apache fileserver on a different port since the image files are part of the same app. And i dont want to create a symlink to the public folder inside webapps since my app is deployed as a war file....Is there a simpler solution similar to using default servlet for static content inside webapps, for static content outside outside webapps

Answer 1

This is the way I did it and it worked fine for me. (done on Tomcat 7.x)

Add a <context> to the tomcat/conf/server.xml file.

Windows example:

<Context docBase="c:\Documents and Settings\The User\images" path="/project/images" /> 

Linux example:

<Context docBase="/var/project/images" path="/project/images" /> 

Like this (in context):

<Server port="8025" shutdown="SHUTDOWN">  ...   <Service name="Catalina">     ...     <Engine defaultHost="localhost" name="Catalina">      ...      <Host appBase="webapps"       autoDeploy="false" name="localhost" unpackWARs="true"       xmlNamespaceAware="false" xmlValidation="false">       ...       <!--MAGIC LINE GOES HERE-->        <Context  docBase="/var/project/images" path="/project/images" />        </Host>     </Engine>   </Service> </Server> 

In this way, you should be able to find the files (e.g. /var/project/images/NameOfImage.jpg) under:

http://localhost:8080/project/images/NameOfImage.jpg  

Answer 2

You could have a redirect servlet. In you web.xml you'd have:

<servlet>     <servlet-name>images</servlet-name>     <servlet-class>com.example.images.ImageServlet</servlet-class> </servlet> <servlet-mapping>     <servlet-name>images</servlet-name>     <url-pattern>/images/*</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping> 

All your images would be in "/images", which would be intercepted by the servlet. It would then read in the relevant file in whatever folder and serve it right back out. For example, say you have a gif in your images folder, c:\Server_Images\smilie.gif. In the web page would be <img src="http:/example.com/app/images/smilie.gif".... In the servlet, HttpServletRequest.getPathInfo() would yield "/smilie.gif". Which the servlet would find in the folder.