title: Tomcat 7 symbolic link to war file
body: <p>I would like to have a symbolic link in tomcat's webapps directory that points to a war file at another place in my file system, and I would like that war file to be served as the default webapp. I have pieced together the following solution, but the app is not accessible from the browser.</p>
  
  <p>I have a folder in my home directory ~/tomcat/webapps. The owner is tomcat7. In this folder, I have my war file, myapp-1.0.war.</p>
  
  <p>In my /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps directory, I have a symbolic link: </p>
  
  <pre><code>myapp -&gt; /home/[me]/tomcat/webapps/myapp-1.0.war.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In my /etc/tomcat7/server.xml, I have: </p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;Context docBase="/var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/myapp" path="" reloadable="true" allowLinking="true"/&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Tomcat starts with no complaints in the logs, but my app is not accessible.
  [host]:8080/rest/ returns 404, where it would normally take me to the home page.</p>
  
  <p>I partially want to do this to abstract out the version number from my war file. Any ideas why this is not working, or what I'm doing wrong?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>