Though the approach of declaring contexts by adding elements to server.xml has been deprecated in current Tomcat versions, it is still the only approach that works across all Tomcat versions. In addition, the handling for these elements is consistent across all Tomcat versions. The support for individual context XML files is not supported for Tomcat 3.2 and varies between the remaining Tomcat versions. For Tomcat 5.0.x and later, WTP 2.0.x and later offers the opportunity to write the contexts to separate XML files in the proper folder (typically conf/Catalina/localhost) according to the requirements of that particular version. This behavior is enabled by checking the Publish module contexts to separate XML files option in the Server Options section of the Tomcat server editor. Note that only contexts for added projects will be written to separate XML files. Manually added contexts in server.xml will remain there.
