In talking about deployment of web applications, the concept of a Context is required to be understood. A Context is what Tomcat calls a web application.
In order to configure a Context within Tomcat a Context Descriptor is required. A Context Descriptor is simply an XML file that contains Tomcat related configuration for a Context, e.g. naming resources or session manager configuration. In earlier versions of Tomcat the content of a Context Descriptor configuration was often stored within Tomcat’s primary configuration file server.xml but this is now discouraged (although it currently still works).
Context Descriptors not only help Tomcat to know how to configure Contexts but other tools such as the Tomcat Manager and TCD often use these Context Descriptors to perform their roles properly.
The locations for Context Descriptors are:
- $CATALINA_BASE/conf/[engine name]/[hostname]/[webappname].xml
- $CATALINA_BASE/webapps/[webappname]/META-INF/context.xml
Files in (1) are named [webappname].xml but files in (2) are named context.xml. If a Context Descriptor is not provided for a Context, Tomcat configures the Context using default values.
