.war files and the webapps directory

A .war file is a packaged Servlet application. It's just a renamed .jar file of the web-app directory tree. Resin provides a special webapps directory which will automatically expand .war files, configured by the <war-dir> attribute in the resin.conf's host configuration.

<caucho.com> <http-server> <http port='8080'/> <host id='*'> <war-dir>webapps</war-dir> </host> </http-server> </caucho.com>

Placing a foo.war in webapps/foo.war will prompt Resin to expand foo.war into webapps/foo/*. Resin will automatically create a new application browsable at the URL http://localhost:8080/foo

You can also use the <war-dir> for development. Just creating a webapps/bar directory will create an application browsable at http://localhost:8080/bar. A small warning, though, any bar.war placed in webapps will delete and replace your webapps/bar directory.

The special .war file ROOT.war can be used to configure the 'root' web-app, i.e. the web-app with no context path. webapps/ROOT is browsed with http://localhost:8080.

Resin always handles all files in a war, even when Resin is used with another webserver like Apache.