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!