Deployment options in Tomcat 5.0

Generally developers are used to deploy J2EE applications by dropping the war file or the application folder directly into the webapps directory of Tomcat.

But it is possible for the application to be deployed in a separate location also - even on a separate logical drive.
We just have to create a XML fragment file and place it in the following folder:
$CATALINA_HOME/conf/[enginename]/[hostname]/[applicationName].xml
If one opens this folder, then we can see the context XML descriptors of all applications deployed on Tomcat.

The files typically contain the docBase attribute that points to the physical location on the hard-disk and the web logical path.

<context path="/ASGPortal" docbase="ASGPortal">

So, if want to deploy the above webapp on a separate path, say d:/myApps/ASGPortal, I copy my webapp folder there and change the docBase attribute in Context. Zimple...... :)

Note: This comes really handy when we are using a Source-control tool and the check-in/check-out folders are not under Tomcat.