IntelliJ IDEA stopped deploying webapp on tomcat

Question

It uses tomcat to deploy. It used to run perfectly fine and when I pressed "Run" it opened a index.jsp in my web-browser which I used as starting navigation point.

But after I decided to try and run it without IDE, by copying contents into tomcat/webapps, something changed, although I'm not sure if it's connected. Now when I press "Run" inside project it just opens up a although absolutely nothing from my project got changed. And if you go into manager from there there are no applications running aside from manager itself, not even ones in /webapps in tomcat directory.

What exactly happened and how can I change it back?

UPDATE it's started working somehow. No idea why and what happened

Answer 1

Tomcat has a web.xml file where you can define your <welcome-file-list>

Please take a look at this

Also you can compile your webApp as a .war to deploy it on your Tomcat server.

Follow the instructions in this link if you need help.