How to set the context path of a web application in Tomcat 7.0

Question

What you can do is the following;

Add a file called ROOT.xml in <catalina_home>/conf/Catalina/localhost/

This ROOT.xml will override the default settings for the root context of the tomcat installation for that engine and host (Catalina and localhost).

Enter the following to the ROOT.xml file;

<Context 
  docBase="<yourApp>" 
  path="" 
  reloadable="true" 
/>

Here, <yourApp> is the name of, well, your app.. :)

And there you go, your application is now the default application and will show up on http://localhost:8080

However, there is one side effect; your application will be loaded twice. Once for localhost:8080 and once for localhost:8080/yourApp. To fix this you can put your application OUTSIDE <catalina_home>/webapps and use a relative or absolute path in the ROOT.xml's docBase tag. Something like this;

<Context 
  docBase="/opt/mywebapps/<yourApp>" 
  path="" 
  reloadable="true" 
/>

And then it should be all OK!

This is the the only solution that worked for me. Add the following to the Host node in the conf/server.xml file.

<Context path="" docBase="yourAppContextName">
 
  <!-- Default set of monitored resources -->
  <WatchedResource>WEB-INF/web.xml</WatchedResource>

</Context>

In Tomcat 9.0, I only have to change the following in the server.xml

<Context docBase="web" path="/web" reloadable="true" source="org.eclipse.jst.jee.server:web"/>

to

<Context docBase="web" path="" reloadable="true" source="org.eclipse.jst.jee.server:web"/>

This little code worked for me, using virtual hosts

<Host name="my.host.name" >
   <Context path="" docBase="/path/to/myapp.war"/>
</Host>

Quickest and may be the best solution is to have below content in <TOMCAT_INSTALL_DIR>/conf/Catalina/localhost/ROOT.xml

<Context 
  docBase="/your_webapp_location_directory" 
  path="" 
  reloadable="true" 
/>

And your webapp will be available at http://<host>:<port>/

It's not recommended to update the server configuration like server.xml or ROOT.xml.

You can put a context.xml configuration file under your web-application META-INF directory, with the context path setting included. This will override the default server setting?

i.e.:

<Context docBase="yourAppName" path="/yourAppPath" reloadable="true">