Tomcat – How to change the ROOT application

tomcattomcat6

I'm trying to change the default application of a Tomcat 6 webserver to a different application than "ROOT" (inside webapps folder). What is the best way to do this?

Best Solution

There are three methods:

First shutdown your Tomcat from the its bin directory (sh shutdown.sh). Then delete all the content of your Tomcat webapps folder (rm -fr *). Then rename your WAR file to ROOT.war, and finally start your Tomcat from the bin directory (sh startup.sh).
Leave your war file in $CATALINA_BASE/webapps under its original name. Turn off autoDeploy and deployOnStartup in your Host element in the server.xml file. Explicitly define all application Contexts in server.xml, specifying both the path and docBase attributes. You must do this because you have disabled all the Tomcat auto-deploy mechanisms, and Tomcat will not deploy your applications anymore unless it finds their Context in the server.xml.

second method: in order to make any change to any application, you will have to stop and restart Tomcat.
Place your WAR file outside of $CATALINA_BASE/webapps (it must be outside to prevent double deployment). Place a context file named ROOT.xml in $CATALINA_BASE/conf/. The single element in this context file MUST have a docBase attribute pointing to the location of your WAR file. The path element should not be set - it is derived from the name of the .xml file, in this case ROOT.xml. See the documentation for the Context container for details.

Reference

Related Solutions

Tomcat – configure the ROOT application to be accessed from another path in Tomcat 6

You need to rename ROOT.xml to myapp.xml with following content,

<Context docBase="/catalina_home/webapps/ROOT.war" />

By doing this, you create 2 contexts "/" and "/myapp" sharing the same WAR file.

If you just want to have one webapp, the easiest thing to do is to rename ROOT.war into myapp.war.

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

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!

Best Solution

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Tomcat – configure the ROOT application to be accessed from another path in Tomcat 6

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

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