Tomcat 4 and mod_jk

I’ve learnt way more about mod_jk in the last week than I ever wanted to know. Apparently the configuration is completely different between Debian 3.1 with Tomcat 4 and the current Debian testing with Tomcat 5 (point something). Why the mod_jk package doesn’t just do the configuration for you is beyond me, or at least have a debconf wizard to do it.

Anyway, with Tomcat 4, the magical directive that makes deciding what to delegate and when simple goes like:

<Location /JSPWiki>

    JkUriSet worker ajp13:localhost:8009

</Location>

You, in theory, should be able to achieve the same thing via the workers2.properties file stuff but I never got it to work. The advantage of JkUriSet is that it embeds neatly into your apache config so you can nest it in a virtual host and it does the right things. You still need to futz with workers2.properties to tell it where the tomcat instance is, but that’s fairly simple if you start with the examples.