SE452: Tomcat Setup [3/20]

Setting up the Invoker Servlet

The invoker servlet is a special servlet that allows you to run and test your servlets without first adding them in web.xml as both a servlet node and servlet-mapping node. This can save you some time during testing and debugging. It basically maps requests for: http://localhost:8080/yourApp/servlet/ServletName to the servlet that is deployed into the WEB-INF/classes directory for yourApp. The ServletName must be fully qualified, so if you want to invoke se452.example.ExampleServlet, you need to run http://localhost:8080/yourApp/servlet/se452.example.ExampleServlet. The invoker servlet was turned off for security purposes.

To enable it, go to "tomcat_home"/conf and edit web.xml. This is a special web.xml file for Tomcat to use for its own purposes. Just search the file for the word "invoker" and uncomment the region that looks like this:

        <servlet>
            <servlet-name>invoker</servlet-name>
            <servlet-class>
              org.apache.catalina.servlets.InvokerServlet
            </servlet-class>
            <init-param>
                <param-name>debug</param-name>
                <param-value>0</param-value>
            </init-param>
            <load-on-startup>2</load-on-startup>
        </servlet>
    

and the one that looks like this:

    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>invoker</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/servlet/*</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>
    

This will allow the invoker servlet to work for the entire container