About a year ago, I set up a web hosting reseller account with WestHost (http://westhost.com). I’ve been pretty happy with them (this site is hosted there), but up until now, I haven’t pushed the limits much.

Today, I tried to set up a new virtual site with Tomcat serving the root context. I’ve never tried to configure this before, but have become accustomed to either deploying my root application either as webapps/ROOT.war or deploying my expanded app in webapps/ROOT

I did this, and it didn’t work. I did an on-line chat with WestHost tech support, and the nice person at the other end of the chat informed me that what I wanted to do was not possible. I thought about it for a moment, and decided that I’d be better off solving this on my own.

After a little “googling”, and some minor trial-and-error, I came up with a 4-step solution: 1. Put your java web application (expanded .war file) in /var/tomcat5/ROOT

  1. Edit /etc/httpd/conf.d/jk.conf, and add the following: #Root mounts JkMount /* ajp13w JkMount /servlet/* ajp13w

3.Edit /etc/http/conf/httpd.conf: find the line that begins with DirectoryIndex It lists all of the allowable “start page” names. Add index.jsp to the front of the list.

  1. Go to /var/www/html and rename index.html to something else, like index.html.orig This is so that this index.html doesn’t override index.jsp in your app, if you’re using that.

  2. Go to your control panel and restart the server.