This is an easy trick which I am sure most of you already know.

Let’s take a Java application called MyAddressBook. Its generated war file could be called myaddressbook.war.

By default, when you deploy this web application to Tomcat, the URL to access it will be http://localhost:8080/myaddressbook/. And if you point a domain name such as ‘addressbook.com’ to this server, the URL would be http://addressbook.com/myaddressbook/.

I don’t know for you but I don’t like to systematically have the subfolder ‘myaddressbook’ after my domain. But maybe I am too picky! 😉

The idea is to deploy our application in the Tomcat root context.
You have two ways of doing this:

• Define a ROOT.xml file in your conf/Catalina/localhost folder, or;
• Rename your war file to ROOT.war.

Note that the case is important, it has to be ROOT in UPPERCASE! 🙂

Once this is done, you will be able to call your application via the URL http://localhost:8080/
or http://addressbook.com/. Way better! 😎