How to get a context.xml working with Tomcat and IntelliJ IDEA

I’ve been learning about connection pools, and I have gotten one working by using Tomcat’s PoolProperties. Now I would like to set one up using a context.xml file with Tomcat and IntelliJ, but I can’t get this to work. How is this done?

A new project with a 4.0 Web Application framework can automatically create a web/WEB-INF directory with a web.xml file, but the web/META-INF directory containing a context.xml file is not created. If I do create web/META-INF/context.xml myself through the Tool Window > Project, and I use this to set up a connection pool as shown below, the file seems to be ignored.

This is my guess as to what might be happening, though I’m sure this is filled with errors: A WAR file is a packaged directory that is sent to Tomcat in an arrangement that Tomcat understands. web/WEB-INF/web.xml is a required file that is needed for a variety of reasons, one of which is to set up servlets. web/META-INF/context.xml is optional, and thus by default, IntelliJ does not create it. When a web/META-INF/context.xml is created manually, it must also be included into the WAR file otherwise IntelliJ will not send it to Tomcat.

Even if the previous paragraph is true though, I still have not gotten Tomcat to use context.xml after trying to add it to the WAR. Maybe I didn’t add it correctly.

context.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<Context>

    <Resource name="jdbc/sql_connection_03" auth="Container"
              driverClassName="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
              url="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/follow_db_01"
              username="root" password="pass"
              maxactive="100" maxIdle="30" maxWait="10000"
              logAbandoned="true" removeAbandoned="true"
              removeAbandonedTimeout="60" type="java.sql.DataSource"/>

</Context>

index.jsp

<%@taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core" %>
<%@taglib prefix="sql" uri="http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/sql" %>
<%@ page contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8" language="java" %>

<sql:query var="rs" dataSource="jdbc/sql_connection_03">
    select ID, Description, PackageSize from products;
</sql:query>

<html>
  <head>
    <title>Index</title>
  </head>
  <body>

    <c:forEach var="row" items="${rs.rows}">
        ${row.ID}<br>
        ${row.Description}<br>
        ${row.PackageSize}<br>
    </c:forEach>

  </body>
</html>

Answer

I had the same issue and adding context lookup to my java code to use the resource defined in context.xml did the job.

It’s the accepted solution from: Tomcat and JDBC connection pooling

Still works with Tomcat 9.0.39

context.xml

index.jsp

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Answer