Understanding context.xml in tomcat 6

Question

I created a mainly empty dynamic web project in eclipse.

It has

• no servlets
• no jsp files

The web.xml is

Answer 1

I think this is a bug in Tomcat. I filed a bug report but they claim it works as designed. Tomcat has 3 modes of deployment: Directory, WAR and Context Fragment. In your case, it gets confused when reloading.

Here is the sequence leading to the error,

1. When you deploy the WAR, the context fragment (META-INF/context.xml) is copied to conf/Catalina/[host] directory.
2. When you modifies the fragment, it correctly detects the change so redeployment is triggered.
3. However, it forgets this is a WAR deployment and treats it as Directory deployment. The directory is removed by undelpoy so you get the error.

If you only change the XML in META-INF, everything should work for you.