Removing the 'crowd' Context from the Application URL

For many different reasons, when using the Crowd distribution (not EAR-WAR), you may want to access the Crowd console using http://localhost:8095 instead of http://localhost:8095/crowd. In order to remove the /crowd part from the URL, you can take the following steps:

IMPORTANT: Before doing these changes in your production environment, please make sure that they will work in a test instance first.

1. Edit file <Crowd-Install>/build.properties and make sure that variable crowd.url is set to the following:

   # Crowd context root
   
   crowd.url=http://localhost:8095/
   

2. Run <Crowd-Install>/build.sh (UNIX) or <Crowd-Install>\build.bat (Windows).

3. Change your <Crowd-Install>/apache-tomcat/conf/server.xml file to have the following Host section configuration:

          <Engine defaultHost="localhost" name="Catalina">
               <Host appBase="webapps" autoDeploy="true" name="localhost" unpackWARs="true">
                     <Context path="" docBase="../../crowd-webapp" debug="0">
                           <Manager pathname="" />
                     </Context>
               </Host>
   
          </Engine>
   

4. Rename the crowd.xml file in <Crowd-Install>/apache-tomcat/conf/Catalina/localhost to crowdbackup.xml to prevent Tomcat from loading the /crowd context. 
5. Run Crowd and access http://localhost:8095. You will be automatically redirected to the Crowd server console page.
6. After restarting, change the remember to change the base url in the Server Settings screen