Problem

Whilst configuring Tomcat to use a context path for the Confluence application, we see warning messages appearing in the Catalina logs

Environment

Reproduced locally using Confluence version 7.18.1 on a Windows Operating System

Steps to Reproduce

1. Create a Vanilla Confluence Server 7.18.1 instance on a Windows OS Server
2. Use server.xml definition below for instance:
   server.xml

   [...]
   <Server port="8000" shutdown="SHUTDOWN" debug="0">
       <Service name="Tomcat-Standalone">
           <Connector port="8090" connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443"
                      maxThreads="48" minSpareThreads="10"
                      enableLookups="false" acceptCount="10" debug="0" URIEncoding="UTF-8"
                      protocol="org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11NioProtocol"/>
   
           <Engine name="Standalone" defaultHost="localhost" debug="0">
               <Host name="localhost" debug="0" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="false" startStopThreads="4">
                   <Context path="/confluence" docBase="../confluence" debug="0" reloadable="false" useHttpOnly="true">
                       <!-- Logging configuration for Confluence is specified in confluence/WEB-INF/classes/log4j.properties -->
                       <Manager pathname=""/>
                       <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.StuckThreadDetectionValve" threshold="60"/>
                   </Context>
               </Host>
   	</Engine>
       </Service>
   </Server>
   [...]
   

3. Restart Confluence and monitor the Tomcat output logs

Expected Results

The Tomcat logs should be cleared of warnings mentioning logIgnoredSymlink

Actual Results

The Tomcat logs can display such warning logs :

[...]
WARNING [http-nio-8090-exec-3] org.apache.catalina.webresources.AbstractFileResourceSet.logIgnoredSymlink Resource for web application [/confluence] at path [/images/brand-image-source.] was not loaded as the canonical path [/images/brand-image-source] did not match. Use of symlinks is one possible cause.
[...]

Workaround

From the testing, the issue is not noticed when not using a context path in Tomcat configuration

Notes

More notes will be added as testing progresses