Bug 40581

Summary: Symbolic links not (re)followed when application is reloaded
Product: Tomcat 5 Reporter: Marc Guillemot <mguillemot>
Component: CatalinaAssignee: Tomcat Developers Mailing List <dev>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED    
Severity: normal    
Priority: P2    
Version: 5.5.9   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: PC   
OS: Linux   

Description Marc Guillemot 2006-09-22 12:29:06 UTC 
When the path of the docBase of an application contains a symbolic link Tomcat
still consider the initial targeted folder after a reload.

Ex:
when file system first contains:
/foo/myApp_version1 (dir)
/foo/myApp -> /foo/myApp_version1 (symbolic link)

Tomcat is started and then application myApp is stopped. Symbolic link is
changed to point to myApp_version2:
/foo/myApp_version1 (dir)
/foo/myApp_version2 (dir)
/foo/myApp -> /foo/myApp_version2 (symbolic link)

and finally application myApp is started. The problem is that the displayed web
application is still the one contained in /foo/myApp_version1 (the initially
targeted folder)and not the one contained in /foo/myApp_version2.
Comment 1 Mark Thomas 2006-11-25 13:23:01 UTC 
This behaviour is by design. You need to undeploy and redeploy your application
for the changes to take effect. I have updated the docs in SVN to make this
clear. The updated documentation will in included in 5.5.21 onwards.