Applications are packaged as .war files.

To deploy a .war file simply copy it to $CATALINA_HOME/webapps

A sample.war file is available at: http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-8.0-doc/appdev/sample/

su - tomcat

cd $CATALINA_HOME/webapps

cp /tmp/sample.war .

This URL will now be available...

http://localhost:8080/sample/

The Sample application will also appear in the list at http://localhost:8080/manager/html

Bibliography