[tomcat7] How do I use Apache tomcat 7 built in Host Manager gui?

Host Manager is a web application inside of Tomcat that creates/removes Virtual Hosts within Tomcat.

A Virtual Host allows you to define multiple hostnames on a single server, so you can use the same server to handles requests to, for example, ren.myserver.com and stimpy.myserver.com.

Unfortunately documentation on the GUI side of the Host Manager doesn't appear to exist, but documentation on configuring the virtual hosts manually in context.xml is here:

http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/virtual-hosting-howto.html.

The full explanation of the Host parameters you can find here:

http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/config/host.html.

Adding a virtual host

Once you have access to the host-manager (see other answers on setting up the permissions, the GUI will let you add a (temporary - see edit at the end of this post) virtual host.

At a minimum you need the Name and App Base fields defined. Tomcat will then create the following directories:

{CATALINA_HOME}\conf\Catalina\{Name}
{CATALINA_HOME}\{App Base}

• App Base will be where web applications will be deployed to the virtual host. Can be relative or absolute.
• Name is usually the fully-qualified domain name (e.g. ren.myserver.com)
• Alias can be used to extend the Name also where two addresses should resolve to the same host (e.g. www.ren.myserver.com). Note that this needs to be reflected in DNS records.

The checkboxes are as follows:

• Auto Deploy: Automatically redeploy applications placed into App Base. Dangerous for Production environments!
• Deploy On Startup: Automatically boot up applications under App Base when Tomcat starts
• Deploy XML: Determines whether to parse the application's /META-INF/context.xml
• Unpack WARs: Unpack WAR files placed or uploaded to the App Base, as opposed to running them directly from the WAR.
• Tomcat 8 Copy XML: Copy an application's META-INF/context.xml to the App Base/XML Base on deployment, and use that exclusively, regardless of whether the application is updated. Irrelevant if Deploy XML is false.
• Manager App: Add the manager application to the Virtual Host (Useful for controlling the applications you might have underneath ren.myserver.com)

Update: After playing around with this same process on Tomcat8, the behaviour I'm seeing is that adding a virtual host via the GUI isn't persistent - it doesn't get written to server.xml, even on shutdown. Therefore (unless I'm doing something terribly wrong), you can create it in the GUI, but you'll need to edit server.xml anyway, as per the first link above, to make it stick.