Settings

View All Settings

The settings command displays a list of settings which control the behavior of tomcat-manager:

tomcat-manager> settings
debug = false                        # show stack trace for exceptions
echo = false                         # for piped input, echo command to output
editor = "/opt/homebrew/bin/emacs"   # program used to edit files
prompt = "tm> "                      # displays before accepting user input
quiet = false                        # suppress all feedback and status output
status_prefix = "--"                 # string to prepend to all feedback output
status_animation = "bouncingBar"     # style of activity spinner from rich.spinner
status_suffix = "..."                # suffix to append to status messages
status_to_stdout = false             # status information to stdout instead of stderr
theme = "default-dark"               # color scheme
timeout = 10.0                       # seconds to wait for HTTP connections
timing = false                       # report execution time upon command completion

Change a Setting

You can change any of these settings using the set command:

tomcat-manager> set prompt = "tm> "
tm> set timeout = 3

You can also change settings using the Configuration File.

The syntax of the set command is simple. The first argument is the name of the setting. You can see all by typing settings, or by scrolling down.

The second argument is an equals sign, ie =.

The third argument is the value of the setting. For settings that are on or off, use either true or false. For settings that are a number, like timeout, just type the number. For settings that are a string, like prompt, enclose the value in quote marks.

Here’s a detailed description of each available setting.

debug

The default value is false. If set to true a Python stack trace will be displayed when an exception occurs.

echo

The default value is false. If you are piping input into tomcat-manager from the shell, it may be useful to have those commands injected into the output, so you can see the command and the output together. Set to true to echo piped input commands into the output.

This setting has no effect if the input is not piped from the operating system shell. If you turn this on, and are interactively typing commands into tomcat-manager, they will not be displayed in the output.

editor

The editor setting contains the full path to the program that tomcat-manager should invoke to edit text files. This setting is used by several commands, most notable is the config edit command used to edit the configuration file. If this setting does not have a value, the contents of the EDITOR environment variable will be used.

prompt

When used interactively, the tomcat-manager program displays a prompt before accepting user input. This setting contains the text to be displayed as the prompt. You can set this to be an empty string to disable the prompt, but that would be very confusing.

The default value is tomcat-manager>.

quiet

By default, tomcat-manager provides useful feedback and status information as it executes commands. If you don’t want to see this information, set quiet to true.

For example, when quiet is set to false (the default), the connect command displays:

tomcat-manager> connect http://localhost:8080/manager ace newenglandclamchowder
--connecting... [=== ]
--connected to http://localhost/manager as ace
--tomcat version: [Apache Tomcat/10.1.0]
tomcat-manager>

If you set quiet to true, no feedback information is displayed

tomcat-manager> set quiet = true
tomcat-manager> connect http://localhost:8080/manager ace newenglandclamchowder
tomcat-manager>

status_prefix

By default, all status and feedback messages begin with --. You can change or eliminate the prefix value by setting status_prefix. You might change it to:

tomcat-manager> set status_prefix = ">>"

Set status_prefix to an empty string to display the status messages with no prefix.

status_animation

Commands which run on the remote Tomcat server can take some time to finish. For example, if you are deploying a large application, it may take several seconds for that application to be transmitted to the server and deployed. tomcat-manager displays an animated activity indicator for these actions. This setting allows you to choose the style of the animation. There are several dozen options available. You can view all the animation styles by:

$ python -m rich.spinner

Press Control-C to exit the demo.

To disable the animated progress display:

tomcat-manager> set status_animation = ""

status_suffix

By default, all status and feedback messages end with ...`. You can change or eliminate the suffix by setting status_suffix to the value you would like appended to status and feedback messages.

Set status_suffix to an empty string to display status messages with no suffix.

status_to_stdout

By default, status and feedback messages are sent to the standard error file descriptor. Set status_to_stdout to true to send those messages to standard output.

theme

The theme to use to apply colors to output. See Themes for more information.

timeout

The number of seconds to wait for a HTTP response from the Tomcat server before timing out with an error. Set to 0 to never timeout (not recommended). Fractions of seconds are allowed, for example, you could:

tomcat-manager> set timeout = 3.5

The default value is 10.

timing

If timing is set to true, tomcat-manager will report the number of seconds it took for each command to execute after the command has completed. The number of seconds is displayed as feedback, which means if you have quiet set to true, you will not see it.