Why is my WAR file automatically exploded in Tomcat?

Question

In Tomcat, I found the .war will be automatically exploded. Is this the behavior expected?

Answer 1

Check out unpackWARs option in server.xml:

<Host name="localhost" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true">

I guess working on exploded archive is faster (I have no idea whether Tomcat explodes the file in-memory when unpackWARs is false or uses some other technique).

Answer 2

Is this the behavior expected?

Yes. This is the default behavior: see the Context config documentation ... and search for unpackWARs.

You can change this on a per-webapp basis using the Context container or you can change it for all webapps using the Host container.