1. Basic Procedures
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## 1. Basic Procedures

If you want to try MeshCMS, the simplest way to get started is to copy `meshcms.war` or `samples.war` into the webapps directory of your application server (e.g. Tomcat or Jetty) and open http://localhost:8080/meshcms/ or http://localhost:8080/samples/.

If you want to deploy a website, you will have to configure a virtual host for it as usual. There is nothing special in the setup of MeshCMS, so please refer to the documentation of your application server to choose the configuration options that best suit your needs.

MeshCMS is able to create thumbnails of images, so you need to provide an environment that allows image processing. On some systems you might need to add the `-Djava.awt.headless=true` option to the Java VM that runs the Servlet container.

Starting from version 3.0, MeshCMS allows to serve multiple sites from within a single context. If you want to do this, you should configure the context to accept all domains that you want to host. Here's a simple example of `server.xml` file for Tomcat 5.5 that accepts all domain names:

    <Server port="8005" shutdown="SHUTDOWN">
      <Service name="Catalina">
        <Connector port="8080" />

        <Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost">
          <Host name="localhost" appBase="/usr/local/tomcat/webapps">
            <Context path="" docBase="ROOT" />
          </Host>
        </Engine>
      </Service>
    </Server>

### Note

`ROOT` is the recommended name for the root context in a Tomcat host.

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