Undeploy web application from tomcat doesn't remove the deployed directory

Question

I am using tomcat manager commands to deploy and undeploy web applications on a tomcat server. The problem is when I try to undeploy a web application, it does remove the .war file from the webapps directory but the exploded directory doesn't get removed (the WEB-INF/lib folder), neither from the List Applications in the tomcat mananger.

I am on Windows and I am using Tomcat 6.0.20.

Note: When I tried to delete the directory manually it gave me an error saying that the file is being used by another program.

Electrocautery

Answer 1

I found the solution, just put this in your context.xml file in your_tomcat_home_directory/Config:

<Context antiJARLocking="true" antiResourceLocking="true">

Everything works fine.

Electrocautery

the docs say: antiJARLocking is a subset of antiResourceLocking and therefore, to prevent duplicate work and possible issues, only one of these attributes should be set to true at any one time – Maleficence

Becareful, the output of ctx.getRealPath("/") will change – Courteous

@Maleficence As abl stated, as the answer it is, Tomcat 11 not staring. Only <Context antiResourceLocking="true" > was enough for me. – Courteous

Answer 2

Try to stop your Tomcatserver(-service), then you can manually delete the exploded directory, then restart it agian.

Toxinantitoxin

I can't stop the tomcat service, it should be done on the fly, there are other applications running and I can't just stop them. – Electrocautery

Answer 3

I was on Windows using cygwin. Even after shutting down tomcat, I could not delete the web application folder - the command kept on returning "Device or resource busy". I noticed that the java process was still running even after I had shut down tomcat so I decided to kill it, and was able to manually delete the web application folder.

Mistaken