Must I restart Tomcat every CSS edit?

[power-alf]

Hi all,

I'm fairly new to Alfresco and am in the process of HEAVILY modifying my own custom template model. While we haven't maunched the service in our office yet, I'm doing some funky stuff with a darker theme for my tech unit.

Can you tell me, why is it necessary for me to restart Tomcat EVERY time I edit and save a CSS file? Is there some major caching going on? It usually takes 2-3 minutes to reload the page after restart in order to see my changes. If there is caching going on, is there any way to turn it off just for the customization process?

I'm still an amateur at web design so I do a LOT of trial and error.

Thanks!

[bopolissimus]

Hi,

I have not done this with alfresco (because I don't do CSS), but from working with tomcat generally, there's a cache you can clear. 

if alfresco is in /opt/alfresco-4.2.c and in linux (find corresponding directory in windows, I can't advise where that might be since I don't use windows)

cd /opt/alfresco-4.2.c/tomcat/work
sudo rm -rf Catalina # or, optionally, drill down to Catalina/localhost and remove just alfresco and share.

compiled JSPs go in there. so removing them (selectively or all of work/Catalina) will have the JSPs be recompiled.  I'm not sure that this will work for CSS files, but worth a try.

Gerald

[power-alf]

Thanks for the suggestion bopolissimus, but unfortunately we are running Windows. I drilled into

"C:\Alfresco\tomcat\work\Catalina\localhost"‍

and tried renaming "share" and "alfresco", but they did not re-create and did not help unfortunately. Not sure what else to try…

[meertens]

For new CSS the answer with clearing dependency caches works for me: https://forums.alfresco.com/forum/developer-discussions/alfresco-share-development/how-refresh-css-w...
Besides that, I've followed the advise in this post for developing:
http://deepak-keswani.blogspot.nl/2011/10/spring-surf-runtime-settings.html