Issue in configuring virtual host in tomcat 7

Question

I am facing issues in configuring virtual hosts in tomcat 7.

Till now, I have done the following:

• Added a Host element in the server.xml file with the appBase as the webapp folder that has my web application.

  <Host name="www.*myhostname*.com" appBase="my_webapp_folder_name" unpackWARs="true"     autoDeploy="true">
      <Context docBase="path_of_external_folder" path="/img" />
  </Host>
  

• Changed the defaultHost in the Catalina Engine.

  <Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="www.*myhostname*.com">
  

• Created a webapp folder (my_webapp_folder_name) in catalina.home. Also created a ROOT folder inside this webapp folder.

• Copied all the JSPs/HTML, class files, CSS etc inside this ROOT folder.

• Created a file ROOT.xml inside the catalina.home/conf/Catalina/myhostname folder with the following contents:

  <Context path="" docBase="${catalina.home}/my_webapp_folder_name/ROOT" />
  

Am I missing something here? Because, after doing all the above, I am unable to connect using the host name. But if I type in the IP address of the server, it works fine.

I cannot say whether there is any permissions related issue or not.

Please help me in resolving this issue.

Answer 1

It must be a matter of name resolution. You must be able to resolve the www.myhostname.com.

You can add a name record if it is only to develop on your computer:

On Windows:

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

On Linux:

/etc/hosts

You can check the resolution with nslookup or dig.

Otherwise, set up your DNS to resolve www.myhostname.com to your Tomcat bind address.