Basanta Thapa's Blog

If we want to run independent sites for different domains, we can make use of a concept called “Virtual Hosting”. A servlet container is able to serve different applications depending on the requested domain.

== Configure Tomcat to serve multiple sites ==

* Create a folder called "sites" in Tomcat (so "sites" and "webapps" are contained within the same directory in the root of your Tomcat-installation).
* Create a subfolder "yourdomain.org" in sites.
* Copy a fresh (or already customized).war from a your application distributable to "sites/yourdomain.org"
* Now edit Tomcat/conf/server.xml and add a second entry for a new virtual host right below the definition for the default host (which is the first entry below):
<pre>...
<!-- This entry is already contained in server.xml -->

<!-- This entry adds a virtual host for yourdomain.org -->

...</pre>
* Now restart Tomcat.
* From now on Tomcat serves all requests for http://yourdomain.org/ from the ROOT-application contained in "sites/yourdomain.org".

== Configure Jetty to serve multiple sites ==

* Create a new folder called '''"sites"''' in the root directory of your Jetty installtion.
* Create a new folder '''jetty/sites/yourdomain.org/'''
* Copy your.war to '''jetty/sites/yourdomain.org/'''
* Create a file with the following content to '''jetty/conf/yourdomain.xml:'''
<pre>
 /

  /sites/yourdomain.org/your.war

     www.yourdomain.org</pre>
* Now restart Jetty.

== Configure Apache as proxy for a servlet container ==

If you're running Apache in front of your servlet container, you'll need to configure Apache as proxy server for your servlet container as follows:
<pre>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all

ServerName yourdomain.org
ServerAlias www.yourdomain.org
ProxyPass / http://www.yourdomain.org:8080/
ProxyPassReverse / http://www.yourdomain.org:8080/</pre>

This way you can easily add additional sites as well. That’s easy, isn’t it?