title: Apache Tomcat under Windows: Changing webapps default directory
body: <p>I am deploying my Java application with Ant. Unfortunately my test deployment on the local machine doesn't work because of Vista. The Program Files directionaries are protected and i don't want to start Ant or Eclipse as an Admin. So i had the idea to move my webapps folder to a workspace subfolder, so i can use relative paths in Ant as well.</p>
  
  <p>The solutions seems to be to modify the Host element in the server.xml. With Linux it isn't such a deal:</p>
  
  <pre><code>  &lt;Host name="localhost"  appBase="/path/to/webapps"
          unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true"
          xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false"&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But with Windows i don't get it right. I tried every possible combinations i could imagine, like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>      C://Users//maerch//Workspaces//Tomcat6.0_webapps
        C:/Users/maerch/Workspaces/Tomcat6.0_webapps
        C:\Users\maerch\Workspaces\Tomcat6.0_webapps
        C:\\Users\\maerch\\Workspaces\\Tomcat6.0_webapps
        C://Users//maerch//Workspaces//Tomcat6.0_webapps\\
        C:/Users/maerch/Workspaces/Tomcat6.0_webapps/
        C:\Users\maerch\Workspaces\Tomcat6.0_webapps\
        C:\\Users\\maerch\\Workspaces\\Tomcat6.0_webapps\\
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The path is also correct, but it doesn't work. There are also no error messages in the log files neither the browser shows a 404 message or anything else. Just a white page without title and so on. Can anyone help?</p>