Clear the Tomcat Work Folder

If you use Tomcat to host your geoportal web application, you will likely have a subdirectory called 'work' in your Tomcat directory. The work directory is where Tomcat writes any files that it needs during run time. Conceptually you can think of it as Tomcat's cache; instead of reloading the web application from Tomcat\webapps, it can just load the cached version from the Tomcat\work directory.

This does not usually create issues unless you are customizing your geoportal web application. You can save yourself much frustration by clearing out the work directory after making a modification to the geoportal web application files (e.g., instead of spending hours trying to figure out why the banner text didn't change after you updated the correct string in gpt.properties, etc.).

To clear the work directory, do the following after making a change to geoportal configuration files:

1. Stop the geoportal web application in Tomcat (or stop Tomcat all together).
2. Go to the \\TOMCAT\work\Catalina\localhost folder.
3. Verify that you are in the \\TOMCAT\work\Catalina\localhost folder and not the \\Tomcat\webapps folder.
4. Delete the 'geoportal' directory from the \\TOMCAT\work\Catalina\localhost folder.
5. Start the geoportal web application in Tomcat (or start Tomcat all together). Note, it may take a little longer than usual to launch the geoportal web application; recall that this is because Tomcat is now loading the updated version of your geoportal web application instead of its cached version.

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