Tomcat : Prevent Locking of Exploded Wars

This page last changed on Jun 19, 2006 by Kees de Kooter

The problem

It is at development time often very convenient to work with exploded wars. Tweaks to JSP files can be made on the fly, without the need to redeploy. Tomcat picks up the changes straight away. The downside is that some jars (ehcache for one) retain some kind of lock when the war is undeployed.

The solution

Fortunately the tomcat developers took care of this. Add the following to $CATALINA_HOME/conf/context.xml (this is the file all deployed webapps 'inherit' from) and those locks will not appear anymore.

<Context antiJARLocking="true">