change scp default directory in `~/.ssh/config`
Solution 1:
The "home" directory is defined by the users' home directory defined in the /etc/passwd
file. I don't believe any opensshd parameter will override this behavior. You can change the home-dir of the user... but I don't think this is what you're looking for.
Solution 2:
The quick fix for this is to create a symbolic link in your own home directory on the remote server to the directory that you want to access:
ln -s /your/long/path/here/to/webapp1 ~/webapp1
That would allow you to quickly access the folder like so:
scp file foo:webapp1/
and allow for expansion in the future (more than one remote folder) and it won't break other programs. I've found this to be helpful on my servers when I have several websites running on the same server and I need to push files to them (I mostly use git for this now).
Solution 3:
Another options is of course a small script/function along the lines of (assuming bash here):
myscp() {
scp ${1%%:*}${SCP_DIR:?/tmp}/${1#*:}
}