Configuring a host

The default server.xml file defines a single engine that delegates all requests to a single 'catch-all' virtual host (named localhost).

<Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost">
…
<Host name="localhost" appBase="webapps"
unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true"
xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">

This configuration is able to handle any request coming in to this Engine, as when a match is not found between the host name specified on a request and the host names configured for an engine, the request is simply forwarded to the default host.

The true power of this element comes from allowing you to configure additional hosts for a single engine. This allows you to support multiple fully qualified domain names on a single physical server and to partition your web application contexts by domain.

As we have seen in the last chapter, it is up to the engine to determine the virtual host that should be asked to handle the incoming request and to delegate...