Access Tomcat root application under different path (on AWS/Elastic Beanstalk)

Question

We are deploying a webapp (.war file) from a legacy system where we have full control over our Tomcat instances to Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk instances.

On our own systems, we access the web app as a path (e.g. http://server-name/my-app if we deploy my-app.war), but Elastic Beanstalk renames our war-file to ROOT.war and hence makes the web app available under http://server-name, which breaks our existing applications.

As per the AWS documentation, we have added a config file under WEB-INF/.ebextensions that copies the following custom context.xml-file to /etc/tomcat7/Catalina/localhost/ROOT.xml:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<Context displayName="localhost" docBase="" path="/my-app">
    <WatchedResource>WEB-INF/web.xml</WatchedResource>
</Context>

We have tried different versions of this file, e.g. omitting docBase, specifying docBase="ROOT", using the aliases parameter etc., providing the full path to the ROOT directory etc., but none has made our WAR-file accessible under the /my-app path.

Finally, we also tried putting this <Context />-definition under the <Host /> section in server.xml, but to no avail. Any suggestions?

Update: when adding the following to server.xml under the <Host/>-definition, I'm able to access my-app under the correct path, but it seems that Tomcat on EB is deploying my application twice now:

<Context path="/my-app" docBase="ROOT/"></Context>

Answer 1

Although we can now access our app under the desired path, the application is still deployed twice by Tomcat. While this is a minor nuisance for us, I can imagine this being a problem on more resource-tight machines. On the plus side, we can now start migrating our apps to no longer use the resource path when accessing the API, which leads to cleaner and shorter API URLs.

Answer 2

I know it's two years late. But seems like disabling deployOnStartup will do the work.

<Host name="localhost"  appBase="webapps"
        unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="false" deployOnStartup="false">