Andrew’s Blog

Earlier this year Sean Corfield blogged about a “multi-web” install of Railo on Tomcat.

I decided to see if I could set up a similar configuration on JBoss 5.1.0 and was able to do it successfully by following Sean’s steps with a few modifications.  These modifications are documented below.

My solution also includes some ideas I learnt from this blog post – http://help.shadocms.com/blog/2009/running-railo-and-adobe-coldfusion-on-the-same-context-root-in-jboss.cfm

Firstly, I took a copy of the jboss “web” instance and named it railo, ie:

copy <JBOSS_HOME>/server/web to <JBOSS_HOME>/server/railo

This will become our railo server instance.

NB: <JBOSS_HOME> is the directory where I installed JBoss – in my case c:/jboss/jboss-5.1.0.GA

Now I started following Sean’s instructions.  The first issue I ran into was when I came to edit the conf/catalina.properties file.  I could not find the JBoss equivalent (there may be one, but I just couldn’t find it).  However I found that by putting the Railo JARs into <JBOSS_HOME>/server/railo/lib this had the same effect.

Next Sean mentioned editing the Tomcat conf/web.xml file.  The corresponding JBoss file to edit is:

<JBOSS_HOME>/server/railo/deployers/jbossweb.deployer/web.xml

At this point we we can start the server and have a look at the server administrator.  To do this (on windows at least) go into the command prompt, cd to <JBOSS_HOME> and run this command:

bin\run -c railo

Once it starts up, you can then browse to http://localhost:8080/railo-context/admin.cfm to view the Railo Server Administrator.

After confirming it runs, stop it again (I just use CTRL-C to stop the JBoss instances – there may be a cleaner way but I am not aware of it).

The next thing in JBoss that differs from the Tomcat instructions is adding your new host definitions.  In Tomcat this is done in conf/server.xml, but in JBoss 5.1.0 it is done in <JBOSS_HOME>/server/railo/conf/bootstrap/profile.xml.

The change I made to this file is shown below:

<!--
 The profile configuration
 This contains required properties:
 The uri to jboss-service.xml.
 The uri to the deployers folder.
 A list of uris to deploy folders. -->
 <bean name="BootstrapProfileFactory">
 <property name="bindingsURI">${jboss.server.home.url}conf/bindingservice.beans</property>
 <property name="bootstrapURI">${jboss.server.home.url}conf/jboss-service.xml</property>
 <property name="deployersURI">${jboss.server.home.url}deployers</property>
 <property name="applicationURIs">
 <list elementClass="java.net.URI">
 <value>${jboss.server.home.url}deploy</value>
 <value>file:///C:/www/railo-deploy</value>
 </list>
 </property>
 <property name="attachmentStoreRoot">${jboss.server.data.dir}/attachments</property>
 <property name="profileFactory"><inject bean="ProfileFactory" /></property>
 </bean>

Note that this is a URI, so it must include file:/// (this caught me out on my first attempt).  How I did this was to create a directory called c:/www/railo-deploy, then in that directory create new directories called web1.war and web2.war

Next (borrowing from the ShadoCMS blog) <JBOSS_HOME>/server/railo/deploy/jbossweb.sar/server.xml to have two more <Host> nodes:

 <Host name="web1.local">
 <Alias>web1.local</Alias>
 </Host>

 <Host name="web2.local">
 <Alias>web2.local</Alias>
 </Host>

The final piece of the puzzle was then to create a web.xml and  jboss-web.xml in each of the WEB-INF dirs, ie:

c:/www/railo-deploy/web1.war/WEB-INF/web.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

<!DOCTYPE web-app
 PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN"
 "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd">

<web-app>
 <display-name>Web App 1</display-name>
 <description>
 Railo Web 1
 </description>
</web-app>

c:/www/railo-deploy/web1.war/WEB-INF/jboss-web.xml

<jboss-web>
<context-root>/</context-root>
<virtual-host>web1.local</virtual-host>
</jboss-web>

c:/www/railo-deploy/web2.war/WEB-INF/web.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

<!DOCTYPE web-app
 PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN"
 "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd">

<web-app>
 <display-name>Web App 2</display-name>
 <description>
 Railo Web 2
 </description>
</web-app>

c:/www/railo-deploy/web2.war/WEB-INF/jboss-web.xml

<jboss-web>
<context-root>/</context-root>
<virtual-host>web2.local</virtual-host>
</jboss-web>

All going well you should now have a working multi-web setup in JBoss.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.