Aliases for different contexts with Apache Tomcat 5.5

Question

I am using tomcat 5.5 and I want to do the following:

If two web applications are deployed (let them be foo and bar) I want to be able to access them both with relative paths and by aliases.

localhost:8080/foo -> foo and foo.example.com -> foo

and respectively

localhost:8080/bar -> bar and bar.example.com -> bar

If I use different Hosts within the Engine and provide aliases -as the documentation dictates- then the aliased urls work fine, but not the relative ones. In order to have them both working properly I need an extra host "localhost" and declare the same contexts again. Here is my server.xml

<Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost">
    <Host name="foo.example.com">
        <Context docBase="webapps/foo" path="" workDir="work/Catalina/foo/_"/>
        <Alias>foo.example.com</Alias>
    </Host>
    <Host name="bar.example.com">
        <Context docBase="webapps/bar" path="" workDir="work/Catalina/bar/_"/>
        <Alias>bar.example.com</Alias>
    </Host>
    <Host name="localhost" appBase="webapps" autoDeploy="false" >
        <Context path="foo" workDir="work/Catalina/foo/_" />
        <Context path="bar" workDir="work/Catalina/bar/_" />
    </Host>
</Engine

Although it works this way, it seems that tomcat is loading each context twice. Is there any other way to achieve this?

Answer 1

It indeed loads the applications twice because you configured it that way. You'd need an apache httpd instance in front of tomcat to do some url rewrite magic.