How to configure a Data Source in Tomcat 5.5.x or 6 for a web application

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In this tutorial you will learn how to configure a datasource [to obtain a database connection] in Tomcat 5.5.x or Tomcat 6.

Step 1: Let us assume Tomcat is installed in C:\tomcat. Navigate to C:\tomcat\conf and open server.xml.

Step 2: Configure a datasource for a web application with context bookstore and docBase as bookstore [in this example the docBase is c:\tomcat\webapps\bookstore] as in the screen shot below. The configuration is under the desired Host. MySQL is considered for the example. The database instance name is bookstoredb. The datasource name is configured as jdbc/datasourcename which will be used in web.xml [explained in next step]



Step 3: Now open web.xml under C:\tomcat\webapps\bookstore\WEB-INF. Place a reference to the Datasource as highlighted in the screen shot. The res-ref-name should be matching the Resource name provided in the server.xml in step 2.



Step 4: Below snippet shows how to obtain Connection in your Java code.