Tomcat7 / Apache2 URL Wildcard Mapping - url

Question

I have a Java Servlet that takes the path of a provided URL request and retrieves database resources from it. For example:
www.mydomain.com/gateway/databasename/tablename
Would retrieve information from the specified table, all nice and REST like. This works just fine on a localhost Tomcat7 server on Windows and Netbeans, but I'm having trouble deploying it on an Apache2 web server running Ubuntu.
This is what my VirtualHost file looks like:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin andrew#mydomain.com
ServerName mydomain.com
ServerAlias www.mydomain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/wordpress
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride all
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
Alias /manager /usr/share/tomcat7-admin/manager
<Directory "/usr/share/tomcat7-admin/manager">
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Allow from all
</Directory>
JkMount /gateway* ajp13_worker
JkMount /manager* ajp13_worker
JkMount /host-manager* ajp13_worker
ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/wordpress_error.log
# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn
CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>
I'm able to navigate to www.mydomain.com/gateway and view the index page for the servlet. If I go to www.mydomain.com/gateway/databasename, I get a 404 error from Tomcat saying the requested resource is unavailable.
However! If I go to www.mydomain.com/gateway/gateway, I then get my servlet's response that "gateway" is an invalid database name.
So I think the problem is somewhere in the VirtualHost file and mapping the URL. Anything at www.mydomain.com/gateway/gateway/* works, but www.mydomain.com/gateway/* does not.
Also the servlet mapping for my deployment's web.xml is correct:
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>Gateway</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/gateway/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
And the mod-jk's worker.properties file looks right:
worker.list=ajp13_worker
worker.ajp13_worker.port=8009
worker.ajp13_worker.host=localhost
worker.ajp13_worker.type=ajp13
I'm not sure where I'm going wrong, and I know it's going to be something obvious. If anyone can help me out, I'd greatly appreciate it!

Answer 1

My guess is that Tomcat is serving the webapp at the / (root) context path when you run it from Netbeans, and the server is serving it at the /gateway context path.
So from Netbeans the base webapp path is: /hostname
But on the server it is: /hostname/gateway
Since the URL pattern of your servlet is /gateway/*, the result is that on the server you have to add an additional /gateway.
To fix it for the server, you need to change the URL pattern of your servlet to /* instead of /gateway/*
Then to make it work again from Netbeans, you need to change the context path from /ROOT to /gateway. I'm not familiar with Netbeans, but from a quick googling you need to right click your webapp go to Properties -> Run, and there you should be able to change the Context Path.