Where is the “work” directory located for a Tomcat instance running in Eclipse?

Question

In Eclipse you can configure numerous servers to run inside the IDE, including Tomcat. Depending on your Tomcat configuration, at some point in the life cycle of a webapp your J

Answer 1

1. On Windows, the easiest way to go to your Eclipse's Tomcat deployment location is to just right-click on the Tomcat instance in the Servers view and click "Browse Deployment Location..."

   You should see Eclipse neatly opening a Windows explorer taking you to the exact location. In my case it takes me to:

   C:\eclipse4.3.2-jee-kepler-SR2-win32\workspaces\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.wst.server.core\tmp1\wtpwebapps

   From there, you can easily browse to the "work" directory as shown below.

   If you follow this, you never have to remember the location!

   Eclipse Servers View:

   
   

   Windows Explorer Opens:

   Windows Explorer (click on address bar to reveal full path):

2. On Amazon EC2 Linux (this has nothing to do with Eclipse however), the Tomcat work directory is at /var/cache/tomcat7/work

   [ec2-user@ip-172-31-xx-xx ~]$ uname -a
   Linux ip-172-31-xx-xx 4.1.10-17.31.amzn1.x86_64 #1 SMP Sat Oct 24 01:31:37 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
   
   [root@ip-172-31-xx-xx] /usr/share/tomcat7 $ ls -l
   total 4
   drwxr-xr-x 2 root root   4096 Jan  5 15:18 bin
   lrwxrwxrwx 1 root tomcat   12 Jan  5 15:18 conf -> /etc/tomcat7
   lrwxrwxrwx 1 root tomcat   23 Jan  5 15:18 lib -> /usr/share/java/tomcat7
   lrwxrwxrwx 1 root tomcat   16 Jan  5 15:18 logs -> /var/log/tomcat7
   lrwxrwxrwx 1 root tomcat   23 Jan  5 15:18 temp -> /var/cache/tomcat7/temp
   lrwxrwxrwx 1 root tomcat   24 Jan  5 15:18 webapps -> /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps
   lrwxrwxrwx 1 root tomcat   23 Jan  5 15:18 work -> /var/cache/tomcat7/work
   
   [root@ip-172-31-xx-xx] /var/cache/tomcat7/work/Catalina/localhost/init/org/apache/jsp $ ls -la
   total 180
   drwxr-xr-x 2 tomcat tomcat  4096 Jan  6 06:37 .
   drwxr-xr-x 3 tomcat tomcat  4096 Jan  6 06:37 ..
   -rw-r--r-- 1 tomcat tomcat 54172 Aug 17  2012 index_jsp.class
   -rw-r--r-- 1 tomcat tomcat  2106 Jan  6 06:37 index_jsp$FileComp.class
   -rw-r--r-- 1 tomcat tomcat  1034 Jan  6 06:37 index_jsp$FileInfo.class
   -rw-r--r-- 1 tomcat tomcat  6460 Jan  6 06:37 index_jsp$HttpMultiPartParser.class
   -rw-r--r-- 1 tomcat tomcat 89445 Aug 17  2012 index_jsp.java
   -rw-r--r-- 1 tomcat tomcat  2210 Jan  6 06:37 index_jsp$UplInfo.class
   -rw-r--r-- 1 tomcat tomcat  1208 Jan  6 06:37 index_jsp$UploadMonitor.class
   -rw-r--r-- 1 tomcat tomcat  1184 Jan  6 06:37 index_jsp$Writer2Stream.class