Service still working after deleting catalina.properties

Question

I've been running a service (java, spring batch, tomcat) for some time now. Then I deleted the catalina.properties file to test some stuff, and suprise! everything still works the same. I was able to run the service, complete a job and so on.

How is that possible? Since the catalina properties file holds all the configuration for database access.. driver, security, etc.

I tried right clicking on the server, Clean and Clean Tomcat work dir, nothing changed.

Edit: Weirdly enough, I found the same properties file in workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.wst.server.core\tmp0\conf even though I did not put it there. Why is that?

Edit2: What I've noticed:

So my properties are stored in workspace\Servers\Tomcat v7.0 Server at localhost-config.

Eclipse apparently only uses the ones from workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.wst.server.core\tmp0\conf . If I delete these, when I publish the server, the normal ones are just copied here and again used from here.

So in order to make it fail, I have to delete the files from both locations. Is this some kind of a caching mechanism? Can it be stopped?

Are you certain that the `catalina.properties` you deleted is the one being used by Tomcat? Do a high-level search for the file `catalina.properties` and be prepared for a surprise. Either this, or by strange luck the default settings are working for you. — Tim Biegeleisen, Jul 24 '15 at 07:30
Are you using a standard Tomcat app server? Which version is it? — Tim Biegeleisen, Jul 24 '15 at 08:13

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 24 '15 at 08:41

Here is a partial answer. I say "partial" because I have an explanation but only a partial solution as I am not an Eclipse guru.

When you launch Tomcat from your IDE, Eclipse is using the properties file found in workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.wst.server.core\tmp0\conf instead of using the properties file located in C:\Apache\apache-tomcat-7.x\conf. One way to immediately get around this problem is to launch Tomcat from a command prompt using catalina start. This should start Tomcat using catalina.properties from the usual default location.

Service still working after deleting catalina.properties

1 Answers1