Accidentally deleted tomcat `webapps` folder

Question

I have accidentally deleted the webapps folder in tomcat. I had 2 web applications there deployed as .war files and the default tomcat folder, "Root", "manager", "host-manager", "examples" and "docs".

Since I am on cloud amazon EC2 instance (ubuntu) and I have no use of tomcat manager, can I simply create a new directory manually called webapps and copy and paste the .war files of my projects?

Will this work or is this subjected to break something at some point?

Answer 1

Absolutely yes, your apps will be automatically deployed again after some seconds.

Moreover, you can download those Root, manager, host-manager, examples and docs folders from the tomcat distribution, and copy them into your webapps directory. The manager and host-manager apps will restart automatically.

Since the configuration to access manager and host-manager is inside conf/tomcat-users.xml, it has not been deleted. So the apps will work like previously, without any change.