Tomcat: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Deploying an Unpacked Webapp Directory

One way of deploying a web application into Tomcat is to deploy it as a directory of webapp content that is not packed into a WAR file. If you deploy your webapp as an unpacked directory, you won't need to pack it into a WAR file at all—you may go straight to deploying it once you have your webapp's content organized, as shown earlier in Figure 3-2.

There are two ways to configure Tomcat to recognize and start your web application, when you first deploy it as an unpacked webapp directory:

server.xml context deployment

Add a Context element to the server.xml file and restart Tomcat.

Context XML fragment file deployment

Add a new context XML fragment file in Tomcat's CATALINA_HOME/conf/[EngineName]/[Hostname] directory tree, or create it as your web application's WEB-INF/context.xml file relative to the root directory of your web application, and then restart Tomcat.

For any given webapp, you should choose just one of the deployment configuration methods. In the next sections, we show you details about each deployment method.

server.xml Context Deployment

You may edit your conf/server.xml file and configure Tomcat to recognize, start, and manage your web application. This is the way we suggest you configure Tomcat for each new webapp you add.

To deploy your unpacked webapp directory using this method, you must add a Context element for your webapp in server.xml and nest your webapp's Context inside a Host container element.

Edit your server.xml file and ...