Make uPortal the Root Context

Goal

Suppose you want to drop the "uPortal" off the url for your portal, i.e. so it can be accessed at "http://my.schoolname.edu".

Solution

Use a context xml file named <catalina_base>/conf/Catalina/localhost/ROOT.xml with this context:

<Context path="" docBase="ROOT" debug="0" reloadable="true" crossContext="true"/>

What this does is makes uPortal the "default" webapp for Tomcat, telling it to try to use the contents of the uPortal "Context" for those cases where a request didn't map into another configured context.

TBD: docBase is the path to the war file.  Does this mean you copy uPortal.war to ROOT.war and remove the default ROOT folder from Tomcat?  If you don't rename the war file or locate it outside of <catalina_base>/webapps I think you'd get the webapp deployed twice.

Note:  Make sure you modify property 'environment.build.uportal.context' in filters/*.properties for your new context; e.g. set to no value.

Alternate solutions

Apache httpd

If you are using Apache httpd, you can leave uPortal at /uPortal and configure Apache to redirect from the root context to /uPortal.

Build uPortal as ROOT.war

Change property 'uportal.docbase' in pom.xml from uPortal to ROOT.  You should remove the ROOT folder that is present by default in <catalina_base>/webapps. See also