<welcome-file-list> being ignored in Tomcat

Question

my web.xml looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee"
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_1.xsd"
         version="3.1">
    <display-name>restapp</display-name>
    <distributable/>
    <welcome-file-list>
        <welcome-file>index.jsp</welcome-file>
    </welcome-file-list>
</web-app>

My main Application class looks something like this:

package com.example.restapp;

import javax.ws.rs.ApplicationPath;
import javax.ws.rs.core.Application;

@ApplicationPath("/api")
public class RestApplication extends Application {}

my directory structure looks like this:

• src/main/webapp
  • /fonts
  • /img
  • /WEB-INF
  • index.jsp
  • index-qa.jsp
  • stylesheet.css

My jax-rs rest app endpoint is successfully served from http://localhost:8080/restapp/api/test

My index.jsp is successfully served from http://localhost:8080/restapp/index.jsp

And yet, when a GET is performed on http://localhost:8080/restapp/ Tomcat returns with a 404.

While I could fix this with some URL rewrites and such, I know Tomcat supports this and would just like to understand why this isn't working. I've tried any number of combinations of adding servlet and servlet-mapping tags, etc., and have given up and now I'm just looking for why this is broken and what I can do to resolve this. Java servers are not my friend today.

Answer 1

According Apache Tomcat 8 Configuration Reference , you must follow war file naming conventions: