Change tomcat base URL

Question

I have a front facing lighttpd server on my domain that redirects a specific URL to a tomcat 8 application server. So, traffic to mydomain.com/app will be pushed to tomcat.

Tomcat, however, sees the "app" portion of the url and tries to match it when serving requests from the default webapp directory location - resulting in 404's for everything. Is there a configuration change I can make to tomcat so that it knows to look that default webapp directory for requests that come from "/app"?

For example, I'd like to access my web application at mydomain.com/app/mywebapp - tomcat should still look for the application at /usr/lib/tomcat8/webapps/mywebapp.

Answer 1

After a few hours of hair-pulling I found an answer to my own question here.

It seems that Apache has made this configuration possible not by editing any configuration but by editing file names under the application root.