Tomcat base URL redirection

You can do this: If your tomcat installation is default and you have not done any changes, then the default war will be ROOT.war. Thus whenever you will call http://yourserver.example.com/, it will call the index.html or index.jsp of your default WAR file. Make the following changes in your webapp/ROOT folder for redirecting requests to http://yourserver.example.com/somewhere/else:

1. Open webapp/ROOT/WEB-INF/web.xml, remove any servlet mapping with path /index.html or /index.jsp, and save.

2. Remove webapp/ROOT/index.html, if it exists.

3. Create the file webapp/ROOT/index.jsp with this line of content:

   <% response.sendRedirect("/some/where"); %>
   

   or if you want to direct to a different server,

   <% response.sendRedirect("http://otherserver.example.com/some/where"); %>
   

That's it.

Name your webapp WAR “ROOT.war” or containing folder “ROOT”

Take a look at UrlRewriteFilter which is essentially a java-based implementation of Apache's mod_rewrite.

You'll need to extract it into ROOT folder under your Tomcat's webapps folder; you can then configure redirects to any other context within its WEB-INF/urlrewrite.xml configuration file.