explicit context failing

[Noah Davis <no...@nyc.rr.com>]

I'm having a strange problem using an explicit context. I have a ".war" file for my application. If I drop it in my webapps folder and use automatic deployment, it works fine -- it gets unpacked and deploys on startup. 

However, if I explictly define the context for this webapp, the webapp does not get unpacked and (possibly as a consequence of) I get jsp compilation errors (cannot find classes in the WEB-INF/classes directory) and path errors. So, tomcat at least knows about this .war file, and can read some of its contents, but but for some reason cannot resolve paths, and does not unpack it.

The relevant part of my server.xml file is below with the explicit definition. Anyone have any ideas on why this might fail?

Thanks in advance.


      <Host name="myhost" debug="0" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true">

<DefaultContext reloadable="true">
</DefaultContext>

         <Context path="/myapp" docBase="myapp.war">
            <Logger className="org.apache.catalina.logger.FileLogger" directory="/home/noah/logs" prefix="catalina_HBS." suffix=".txt" timestamp="true"/>
         </Context>

</Host>