Tomcat cluster farm deployer attribute "watchDir"

Question

I was looking at the documentation of Tomcat 7, to understand how the clusters work.
The documentation talks about a Deployer tag:

<Deployer className="org.apache.catalina.ha.deploy.FarmWarDeployer"
                    tempDir="/tmp/war-temp/"
                    deployDir="/tmp/war-deploy/"
                    watchDir="/tmp/war-listen/"
                    watchEnabled="false"/>

But the documentation about it is very poor: http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/config/cluster-deployer.html

I found something in the javadocs of the class http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/api/org/apache/catalina/ha/deploy/FarmWarDeployer.html

What I can't find is what is the attribute watchEnabled?

Answer 1

Here some knowledge about it : - Deployer must be declared inside a section

• watchDir is the directory where you can put your delivery. The deployment process will start from here

• deployDir is the directory where your application will be deployed (most probably webapps/ )

• and tempDir is the directory used by the server while the deployment is underway.

• FarmWarDeployer is the only deployer implementation that I know. If you wish to extend this one, you can probably set your own implementation

• WatchEnabled should be set to true on your master node and false on other nodes. The application will be deployed from the master to the other nodes.

Best regards, Cyril