How to change the ROOT application?

Question

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

In Tomcat 7 with these changes, i'm able to access myAPP at / and ROOT at /ROOT

<Context path="" docBase="myAPP"/>
<Context path="ROOT" docBase="ROOT"/>

Add above to the <Host> section in server.xml

Adding a <Context> tag in the <Host> tag in server.xml for Tomcat 6 will resolve the problem.

If you use path="" empty you can use a URL like http://localhost/first.do.

In the context tag set attributes docBase="E:\struts-ITRCbook\myStrutsbook" and reloadable="true", then end the context tag.

It should look something like this:

<Host name="localhost"  appBase="webapps" 
        unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true"
        xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">
    <Context path="" docBase="E:\struts-ITRCbook\myStrutsbook" reloadable="true">
    </Context>
</Host>

ROOT default app is usually Tomcat Manager - which can be useful so I felt like keeping it around.

So the way i made my app ROOT and kept TCmgr was like this.

renamed ROOT to something else

mv ROOT TCmgr

then created a symbolic link whereby ROOT points to the app i want to make the default.

ln -s <your app> ROOT

worked for me and seemed the easiest approach.

According to the Apache Tomcat docs, you can change the application by creating a ROOT.xml file. See this for more info:

http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/config/context.html

"The default web application may be defined by using a file called ROOT.xml."

You can do this in a slightly hack-y way by:

1. Stop Tomcat
2. Move ROOT.war aside and rm -rf webapps/ROOT
3. Copy the webapp you want to webapps/ROOT.war
4. Start Tomcat