I've gone through the threads that describe how to configure a given WAR (say abc.war) as default web-app in tomcat.
Either
Rename the abc.war to ROOT.war
or
Create a context ROOT.xml in ${tomcat.home}/conf/Catalina/localhost with path="" and docBase set to relative/absolute path to the war (keeping the abc.war
outside of webapps to avoid double deployment).
Both the solutions result in ROOT.war in webapps (appBase) directory. However I want to retain the WAR name (abc.war) in webapps and not have a separate ROOT.war to achieve this.
One solution that worked in my case was adding a context under <Host> tag in server.xml . But as per Tomcat 7 Doc , it's not recommended to add context directly in server.xml.
Could someone point me to an alternative?
Thanks.
detailed approach
First Method:
first shutdown your tomcat [from the bin directory (sh shutdown.sh
)] then you
must delete all the content of your tomcat webapps folder (rm -fr *
) then
rename your WAR file to ROOT.war
finally start your tomcat
[from the bin directory (sh startup.sh
)]
Second Method:
leave your war file in CATALINA_BASE/webapps
, under its original name - turn off
autoDeploy and deployOnStartup in your Host element in the server.xml file.
explicitly define all application Contexts in server.xml, specifying both path
and docBase. You must do this, because you have disabled all the Tomcat
auto-deploy mechanisms, and Tomcat will not deploy your applications anymore
unless it finds their Context in the server.xml.
Note:
that this last method also implies that in order to make any change to any
application, you will have to stop and restart Tomcat.
Third Method:
Place your war file outside of CATALINA_BASE/webapps
(it must be outside
to prevent double deployment). - Place a context file named ROOT.xml
in
CATALINA_BASE/conf//
. The single element in this context file MUST have a
docBase attribute pointing to the location of your war file. The path element
should not be set - it is derived from the name of the .xml file, in this
case ROOT.xml
. See the Context Container above for details.