Auto-deploy WAR to arbitrary URL on Tomcat

Question

How can I auto-deploy a WAR file (created by Play! framework, by the way) to Tomcat 6, but on an arbitrary URL such as "/sub/url", and without changing the WAR filename?

I know I can simply upload it as "sub#url.war" and Tomcat will automatically deploy it to "/sub/url", but my filename contains a special site identifier so I would like to keep the filename even if the URL changes.

Lets assume the filename is "specialfilename.war".

I also tried to add a META-INF/context.xml file to the WAR

<Context path="/sub/url" /> 

but that does not get used in any way. Tomcat copies that file to "conf/Catalina/localhost/specialfilename.xml" but the specified URL path does not affect anything. My application keeps getting auto-deployed to "/specialfilename".

Answer 1

Thanks to a mailing list response, I found a way to do what I want.

The solution is to not use the auto-deploy feature for WAR files in "/var/lib/tomcat6/webapps", but instead uploading the WAR file to another directory. Then one must explicitly create a context configuration file matching the URL path, e.g. "/var/lib/tomcat6/conf/Catalina/localhost/sub#url.xml" with this content:

<Context docBase="/path/to/war/arbitrary-filename.war" />