I'm using Ubuntu's default installation of Tomcat 6. I'm deploying a ROOT.war, and trying to set an environment variable specific to it, i.e. accessible from System.getenv() in the Servlet.init(config). According to the docs (http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/config/context.html), I can specify this in a Context element in conf/Catalina/localhost/ROOT.xml. I've created that with these contents: <Context> <Environment name="FOO" value="bar" type="java.lang.String" override="false"/> </Context> And I've deployed the webapp as usual, i.e. to webapps/ROOT.war. Server.getenv("FOO") in the Servlet.init(config) still returns null. What am I missing?