I was looking for functionality that would allow me to deploy one physical directory with two different deployment descriptors. The apps essentially use the same code base, but expose different pages, URLs and resources. After looking through the source code, I found the altDDName attribute defined in j.o.a.c.startup.ContextConfig. This does exactly what I need. I added the attribute to my context.xml, and my application deployed as expected. Here's what I would propose for documentation for config/context.html#Attributes: altDDName The absolute path (or URL) to the deployment descriptor for this context. This overrides the default deployment descriptor name /WEB-INF/web.xml. Specifying the alternate deployment descriptor name allows you to deploy more than one application from one path.
Docs updated. Thanks for the report. This has been fixed in: - 9.0.x for 9.0.0.M22 onwards - 8.5.x for 8.5.16 onwards - 8.0.x for 8.0.45 onwards - 7.0.x for 7.0.79 onwards