Overview

Tomcat (or other servlet containers) are configured to listen on one or more ports, so each request received on one of those ports is targeted to a particular webapp based on the name of the .war file deployed under the webapps/ directory. The targeted webapp is determined based on the first directory in incoming requests.

If there are two webapps deployed under the webapps/ directory, called webappA.war and webappB.war, then an incoming request /webappA/file1 will be received by the webapp inside webappA.war as the request /file1. An incoming request for webappB/images/foo.gif will be received by the webapp inside webappB.war as /images/foo.gif.

Tomcat (and other servlet containers) allow a special .war file to be deployed under the webapps/ directory called ROOT.war which will receive requests not matching another webapp. If the above example also included a webapp deployed under the webapps/ directory named ROOT.war, then requests starting with webappA/ will be received by webappA.war, requests starting with webappB/ will be received by webappB.war, and all other requests will be receieved by the ROOT.war webapp.

If possible, deploying your webapp as ROOT.war will result in somewhat cleaner public URLs, but this is not a requirement. The examples below all include alternate URL configuration prefixes depending on whether you deploy the Wayback .war file as either ROOT.war or wayback.war.

AccessPoint Config

OpenWayback configures how requests that are received by the Wayback webapp are routed to the appropriate AccessPoint using two properties. The first is the internalPort property that should contain the port to match. The second is the accessPointPath that should contain the complete URL to the accesspoint. For example: 

            
            <property name="accessPointPath" value="http://localhost:8080/wayback/"/>
            <property name="internalPort" value="8080"/>

These two properties indicates how requests Wayback allows targeting AccessPoints based on:

  • hostname
  • port
  • first path after the optional webapp deployment name (which is empty if you deploy your Wayback webapp as ROOT.war)