Tomcat: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Customized User Directories

Some sites like to allow individual users to publish a directory of web pages on the server. For example, a university department might want to give each student a public area, or an ISP might make some web space available on one of its servers to customers that don't have a virtually hosted web server. In such cases, it is typical to use the tilde character (˜) plus a user's name as the virtual path of the user's web site:

http://www.cs.myuniversity.edu/˜ian
http://members.mybigisp.com/˜ian

Tip

The notion of using ˜ to mean a user's home directory originated at the University of California Berkeley during the development of Berkeley Unix, when the C shell command interpreter was being developed in the late 1970s. This usage has been expanded in the web world to refer to a particular directory inside a user's home directory or more generally a particular user's web directory, typically a directory named public_html.

Tomcat gives you two ways to map this on a per-host basis, using a couple of special Listener elements. The Listener's className attribute should be org.apache.catalina.startup.UserConfig, and the userClass attribute specifies one of several mapping classes. If your system runs Unix and has a standard /etc/passwd file that is readable by the account running Tomcat, and that file specifies users' home directories, use the PasswdUserDatabase mapping class:

<Listener className="org.apache.catalina.startup.UserConfig" directoryName="public_html" userClass="org.apache.catalina.startup.PasswdUserDatabase"/> ...