There are many articles on the Internet about how to change the servlet context path.
Today, while examining the codes in a legacy project, I saw that the following definition was made in the application.yaml
server:
servlet:
context-path: /v1
Frankly, I was wondering. Why would we want to change the servlet context path?
One reason I can think of is when you want to make the application available behind a reverse proxy that routes incoming traffic via path prefixes, e.g.:
https://example.com --> Web App
https://example.com/v1/something --> V1 App
https://example.com/v2/something-else --> V2 App
Here is my real situation.
We have an dev server which is deployed with below context path:
/dev-context
QA or tester have different server and dev can't deploy without permissions and we only able to deploy after important bugs were fixed, if not , we only able to deploy at Friday with approval of managers to avoid regression test (regression test take so long).
/tester-context
To avoid conflicting on dev server, so our team decide to have more context path to test real data of test server sometimes... due to many complicated situations
/dev-connect-with-tester-sever-db
First you need to understand, that:
context, in terms of web applications, is a way to differentiate between different (more than one) web applications on the same host; i.e. one context is one web-application, and another - is another, both served on the host.
Context is usually identified by the context address/name, that immediately follows that / after the host (and optionally - port) name.
Hence, different contexts on the same host will constitute different/disparate web-applications, or different instances/versions of the same web application (that is effectively, again - different applications).
Root context, for example, is the case if your application (its index.html, in some cases) is available and accessible on hostname:port/.
Having different contexts can be useful for: