How to disable specific apps from starting during Tomcat startup?

Question

My company is preparing a new production box while the current one is running. I would like to proactively install applications in Tomcat container of the new production box but would like to keep them disabled (similar to the feature present in Websphere) - this is very important because some of the applications poll for the data from the database and starting an application would interfere with current production deployment. They would be enabled at the time of production switch-over.

How would I accomplish this? Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

add deployIgnore attribute in <Host>, and the value is the regular expression of the dirs you want to ignore, if you want to ignore foo,just set deployIgnore="foo" and you want to ignore more dirs,use regular expressions to set the values

Answer 2

You can simply rename de WEB-INF directory inside the webapp that you don't want to auto-start to some other name like Disabled-WEB-INF, before starting tomcat.

Later on, if you wish to start that app, while tomcat is running, simply rename back the directory to WEB-INF.

Answer 3

You can use tomcat web application manager; this webapp does let you stop any application inside tomcat from running.