Deploying a WAR file gives me a 404 Status Code on Tomcat?

Question

I am fairly new to Tomcat. I just managed to build a project and exported it as a WAR file. I tried manually copying a WAR file to the Tomcat folder then restarting. It created the folder structure and everything but I get a 404 Status code when I try to reach the application. I tried deploying it through the Tomcat Admin panel but I'm seeing the same behavior. Am I doing anything fundamentally wrong?

Answer 1

did you try

localhost:8080/app

assuming your war is app.war?

edit for comment -- then your web.xml is screwed up.

Answer 2

My best guess is that you have not configured the welcome files in your web.xml. If you go to /app/ you need to have some default file available. Typically, people either created an index.html or they have welcome file settings to point the user to the correct jsp.

Answer 3

Assuming that you have full privileges with the Tomcat installation, try going to http://localhost:8080/manager/html/, if you don't know the password to get into that area, look for the tomcat-users.xml file in your ${tomcat-installation}/conf directory, and that should have it. If it has no entries in it then you will want to add an entry like the following to it:

<user name="username" password="password" roles="admin,manager" />

See whether your application shows up in that screen, and if it does, click on the link and see if that gets you anywhere. If it doesn't, then I suggest following ifishers's advice, and looking at the log files to see if it lists any errors.

But long story short, most likely something is screwed up with your project's web.xml