Deploying a .war file - outside of Tomcat default webapps?

Question

I would like to deploy a war file outside of the [tomcat]/webapps directory.
How can I get tomact to recognize AND unpack a war file in a location other then the default webapps directory?
I have tried the following;
altering server.xml -
added context pointing directly to .war in other directory.
adding context.xml entry to my war -
added context.xml to META-INF of my war file, indicating that the docBase should be in outside directory.
Neither of these created the desired result.
Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The following is from tomcat docs
- http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/config/host.html
appBase : The Application Base directory for this virtual host. This is the pathname of a directory that may contain web applications to be deployed on this virtual host. You may specify an absolute pathname for this directory, or a pathname that is relative to the $CATALINA_BASE directory. Going by that. try making the change as below in your server.xml
<Host name="localhost" appBase="your_directory"
       unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true"
       xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false" deployXML="true">I am going by what the doc says.
I havent tried it out myself, so do let us know if that worked.
cheers,
ram.