I created a war and deployed it to my $CATALINA_HOME/webapps folder just fine. Then I wanted to test configuring it to point to a war at an arbitrary location such as c:\tmp\mywar.war. Here is what I put in the server.xml file within $CATALINA_HOME/conf.
<Host name="localhost" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true">
<Context path="/blah" docBase="h:/tmp/mywar.war" reloadable="true" />
</Host>
Tomcat returns 404 when I try to load localhost:8080/blah. If I point docBase to the exploded war instead, it works just fine. What am I missing here?
Best Answer
You'd better put the context configuration in an individual file at /META-INF/context.xml inside the application files.
You can check out more details in Tomcat7 document here: http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/config/context.html#Defining_a_context