Question

Just moved from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and noticed that when you deploy a webapp called widget the META-INF/context.xml no longer get copied to conf/Catalina/localhost/widget.xml.

What Im unclear about is whether it needs to be, will the settings in context.xml be used if left in META-INF or do they only have effect if moved to conf/Catalina/localhost/widget.xml

Im using a vanilla tomcat 7 installation

Answer 1

See the documentation (my emphasis):

Individual Context elements may be explicitly defined:

• In an individual file at /META-INF/context.xml inside the application
  files. Optionally (based on the Host’s copyXML attribute) this may be
  copied to $CATALINA_BASE/conf/[enginename]/[hostname]/ and renamed to
  application’s base file name plus a “.xml” extension.

The documentation for Host has this to say on copyXML:

Set to true if you want a context XML descriptor embedded inside the
application (located at /META-INF/context.xml) to be copied to xmlBase
when the application is deployed. On subsequent starts, the copied
context XML descriptor will be used in preference to any context XML
descriptor embedded inside the application even if the descriptor
embedded inside the application is more recent. The flag’s value
defaults to false. Note if deployXML is false, this attribute will
have no effect.