How to specify path in META-INF/context.xml for Tomcat

Question

I'm using Tomcat 7 and would like to set the context root of a war file in the war file itself and have Tomcat autodeploy and pick up this path. I thought I found the way to do it by putting a context.xml in the META-INF directory of the war which contains.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Context path="/somepath/myapp"/>

But this doesn't seem to work, I think it's loaded by http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/api/org/apache/catalina/startup/SetContextPropertiesRule.html which states it loads everything but the path!

I know I can name the war somepath#myapp.war and it will pick it up but I also deploy to weblogic which isn't happy with a name like this.

Is there some setting I can use to have the path work from the context.xml above?

Thanks David

Answer 1

The Context path attribute is ignored unless the path is specified in a hard-coded Context in server.xml, which is strongly discouraged, and doesn't take multilevel paths.

The name of the war file, or the name of the Context xml file in tomcat/conf/Catalina/hostname becomes the path of the deployed application.

In your case the latter of the two above is the solution, just make sure you put the .war file outside of the designated appBase for the Host, or you'll deploy the app twice.

In: conf/Catalina/localhost/myapp#path.xml

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Context docBase="/some/path/to/myapp.war">
</Context>

Answer 2

In /tomcat7/conf/server.xml add below lines inside the element and restart Tomcat to make changes take place.

*change "mycom" to your application name.

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

This will make the default root application appear under context root "/ROOT".

Now your app is accessible at "/" and "/mycom" as well!