Put webMathematica folder outside Tomcat webapps folder?

Question

Is it possible to put the webMathematica folder outside the usual Tomcat webapps folder and still have webMathematica work?

webMathematica does work OK if its whole folder is placed inside Tomcat's webapps — and accessed in the browser as localhost:8080/webMathematica.

(This is with Tomcat 9 under OS X 10.10.4 and using webMathematica 3.3.2 calling Mathematica 10.2.)

Configuration details would be greatly appreciated!

In asking this I have four aims:

1. Granularize things so that I can just back up the webMathematica folder, along with other documents of mine, separately from backing up Tomcat's own files such as those in its distributed webapps folder.

2. Be able to access webMathematica (and, eventually, some specific apps using it) on localhost by means of a simple URL "alias", such as webmathematica, rather than the usual complete URL localhost:8080/webMathematica — just as I can now access Tomcat's webapps by entering the URL tomcat.local.

3. [added] Still allow use of Tomcat for webapps other than webMathematica. Thus changing the entire Tomcat docBase value — if that actually worked — would not allow achieving this aim.

4. [added] Be able to run webMathematica in my browser by entering a simple URL such as webmathematica.local(without the fully-qualified URL localhost:8080/webMathematica).

Answer 1

Yes, it's possible. So you don't have to type the webMathematica after your localhost address.

Steps:

1. Put your webMathematica folder in some place like C:\webMathematica
2. Create a file named ROOT.xml inside \Tomcat\conf\Catalina\localhost\
3. In this file, write: <Context docBase="C:\webMathematica" reloadable="false"/>
4. Restart you Tomcat, and now your new root is your webMathematica application