Installation WARFileDeployment - getrailo/railo GitHub Wiki

The idea of WAR file deployment is to offer a very easy deployment mechanism for web applications. A web application typically contain templates (cfm, html, jsp, gif, jpg etc.), java classes and jars and of course the configuration of the application defined in the enclosed web.xml.

Have in mind that everything deployed by the WAR file is restricted to the server context that is generated for it. It acts like an instance sandbox which means that if you deploy 10 WAR files on a server you will end up with 10 running Railo instances. The deploying mechanism itself is not specified in the servlet specification. Normally (Tomcat, Resin, Jetty) you can simply drop the WAR file into a certain directory (mostly called webapps) and then the application server deploys the WAR file automatically.

On some other JEE servers, you might need to unzip the WAR file first (either perform a jar xf or rename to .zip and unzip it) and put the expanded tree into the deploy folder. So, basically, the WAR file is a ZIP of the webroot.

It takes around 30 seconds to install Railo together with Tomcat on a server. Here's the approach:

    * unpack the file apache-tomcat-6.0.29.zip
    * execute the file bin/startup.sh or bin/startup.bat on Windows
    * copy the file railo-3.2.1.000.war to Tomcat's webapps folder
    * browse to http://localhost:8080/railo-3.2.1.000/
    * Ta-da! - done

This is what an easy installation is supposed to be!

The only difference is that for each war deployment a separated application context is created so that your application URL might be hostname/warfilename.

Note: If you are deploying a Railo WAR into a Tomcat server with an existing global Railo install, you need to change the servlet-name to something unique, both in the servlet section and for all related servlet-mappings.