I am just getting started to learn about Web Apps and deploying them to Tomcat. So I started with a sample web app project - made up of struts, hibernate, etc., etc.
The ANT build was successful. Also, was able to deploy the web app through an xml under Catalina/host. I am able to open the web site with no issues.
This is the structure of my web app
-exploded -WEB-INF -classes -lib -web.xml -index.jsp -welcome.html
My question is
How does Tomcat know which is the first page / starting page / home page that it is supposed to open? Which file is this specified in?
This question is related to
tomcat
web-applications
In any web application, there will be a web.xml in the WEB-INF/ folder.
If you dont have one in your web app, as it seems to be the case in your folder structure, the default Tomcat web.xml is under TOMCAT_HOME/conf/web.xml
Either way, the relevant lines of the web.xml are
<welcome-file-list>
<welcome-file>index.html</welcome-file>
<welcome-file>index.htm</welcome-file>
<welcome-file>index.jsp</welcome-file>
</welcome-file-list>
so any file matching this pattern when found will be shown as the home page.
In Tomcat, a web.xml setting within your web app will override the default, if present.
Further Reading
I already had index.html in the WebContent folder but it was not showing up , finally i added the following piece of code in my projects web.xml and it started showing up
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>default</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
Source: Stackoverflow.com