How to define the default context ?

[Jay Damon]

I have installed Eclipse 3.4 and Tomcat 5.5.26 with the Sysdeo plugin and have gotten everything to work correctly with a simple web app. The problem is that, in order to get things to work correctly, I had to define a specific web context, e.g. "\Test", for my Tomcat project context. However, I want my web app to be the default web app using "\" as the context.

There is a default Tomcat web app that currently responds to the default context but, being relatively new to Tomcat, I am unable to determine exactly where it is declared. I found my web app's context file, e.g. Test.xml, in C:\Apache\tomcat-5.5.26\conf\Catalina\localhost along with others name admin.xml, host-manager.xml and manager.xml but the default context does not appear to be declared in any of these files or in server.xml.

I have reviewed the documentation at Tomcat site but I still don't see the answer. I am obviously overlooking something but at this point I am unable to see it. Can someone provide some clues as to how to make my web app the default web app? Thanks!

[Dave Wingate]

I'm sure that there's a way to update the tomcat configuration xml files to change the root web application, but I can never remember how ... so I cheat. The default configuration of tomcat associates the root context with webapps/ROOT, so I usually create a symbolic link from webapps/ROOT to whichever webapp I want to be the root. I'm sure this is not the best way to get the job done, but it definitely works and is easy to do.

[Jay Damon]

Nevermind. Found and removed the problem web app named ROOT from Tomcat webapps folder and reset my web app context to "/".

[Jay Damon]

Thanks David for your response. We must have posted at the same time but I essentially came with your solution.