This article shows how to configure Virtual Hosts in Apache Geronimo with Tomcat. By default, when you deploy and start an application in Geronimo, that application will be listeting on every available host name. By configuring a virtual host you can make an application to listen on a specific host name or IP. The configuration steps described in this article are also valid then you are sharing a single IP among several host names.

To configure a virtal host is Geronimo you basically need to:

• #Configure local host or DNS
• #Define Virtual host
• #Declare the virtual host in the deployment plan
• #Deploy the application

Configure local host or DNS

To make this configuration work you need to ensure that Geronimo can resolve the virtual host name you are about to define. Depending on your network configuration you can add an entry to you DNS, an alias to the Geronimo server IP. Alternatively you can add an entry to the local host table, each operating system has it's own way to define a local host table. For example Windows will have %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Define Virtual host

...
<module name="geronimo/tomcat/1.1/car">
<gbean gbeanInfo="org.apache.geronimo.tomcat.HostGBean" name="geronimo/tomcat/1.1/car?ServiceModule=geronimo/tomcat/1.1/car,j2eeType=Host,name=TomcatVirtualHost">
<attribute name="className">org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost</attribute>
<attribute name="initParams">name=host1.com
       appBase=
       workDir=work</attribute>
</gbean>
...

Declare the virtual host in the deployment plan

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://geronimo.apache.org/xml/ns/j2ee/web-1.1">
	<environment>
		<moduleId>
			<groupId>sample.applications</groupId>
			<artifactId>HelloWorldApp</artifactId>
			<version>1.1</version>
		</moduleId>		
	</environment>
  	<context-root>/hello</context-root>
	<host>host1.com</host>
</web-app>

Deploy the application