Tomcat 6 and Automatic Deploy

NOTE: I'm publishing this post quickly and I haven't had the time to properly explain it here and promise to come back to this topic. I've been asked several times about this behavior so I thought was worth documenting it.

Tomcat 6 has an "Automatic Application Deployment" feature that does the following:

• Every time a new .war file is deployed to the appBase folder (default is tomcat/webapps), tomcat automatically unpacks the new war file and generates a default Context element for it.
  


• Every time a new .war file is added or the docBase folder defined in the container changes, the unpacked content within the appBase folder is undeployed and the context settings, such as the /tomcat/conf/Catalina/localhost/myapp.xml, is automatically undeployed too.
  

This behavior has causes me trouble. I like to leave a context xml file in the conf/Catalina/localhost directory with a docBase pointing to where I assemble/compile by war file. Each time I do a new build, the context xml file under conf/Catalina/localhost is removed.

To disable tis auto-deploy behavior, modify Tomcat's server.xml file. Within the container, set the parameter of "autoDeploy" from "true" to "false".