Apache Guacamole: how to change the default URL path (/guacamole) to something else

Say you want to change Apache Guacamole’s URL from http://server:8080/guacamole to something like http://server:8080/my-hidden-guacamole-instance (or perhaps you’re using nginx to proxy requests to Guacamole / Tomcat and you don’t want any path at all).

1. Stop Tomcat web server (typically using a command like: service tomcat8 stop)
2. Navigate to Tomcat’s webapps/ directory (typically cd /var/lib/tomcat8/webapps/). Among other things inside you will find guacamole.war.
3. Backup and then delete guacamole directory (NOT guacamole.war)
4. Two options, depending on how you want your Guacamole URL to look like:
   1. If you want to change /guacamole to /my-hidden-guacamole-instance, rename guacamole.war to my-hidden-guacamole-instance.war.
   1. If you want to change /guacamole to / (no path), first — rename ROOT directory to something like ROOT_OLD (or just remove it). Then, rename guacamole.war to ROOT.war
5. Start Tomcat. A new directory will be created inside webapps/ with the same name as the .war file.