Deploying a War File to Tomcat Root With Maven pom.xml

Question

Assuming the following pom.xml maven would build a client.war file which when deployed to Tomcat will have the URL www.server.com:8080/client/

What would one have to change so the application can be reached at the server root www.server.com:8080/?

<project>
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    <groupId>...</groupId>
    <artifactId>client</artifactId>
    <packaging>war</packaging>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <name>...</name>
    <url>http://maven.apache.org</url>
    <build>
        <resources>
            <resource>
                <directory>target/generated-resources</directory>
            </resource>
            <resource>
                <directory>src/main/resources</directory>
                <filtering>true</filtering>
            </resource>
        </resources>
        <plugins>
            ...
        </plugins>
        <finalName>client</finalName>
    </build>
...
</project>

Solution 1

I believe you can leave the war named client.war if you'd like. Then configure the tomcat6 plugin, setting the path like this:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.maven</groupId>
  <artifactId>tomcat6-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>2.0-beta-1</version>
      <!-- put the configuration in an execution if you want to... -->
      <configuration>
        <path>/</path>
        <warFile>${project.build.directory}/client.war</warFile>
        <!-- other config options here -->
      </configuration>
</plugin>

I haven't used tomcat7 version of the plugin, but I'm guessing it's similar.

Solution 2

Since you're using the combination of eclipse, tomcat, and maven, I'm going to make the guess that the m2e-wtp plugin is in use here. There's a FAQ that addresses this. This also shows though how to change your context root in a maven specific way (using the war plugin for specifying a finalName for the war) which results in a correctly named war file (such as ROOT.war as mentioned in other answers.