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).

(See Docker image specific instructions in the comments section below).

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

  1. Marcel says:

    Hi, is there a way to do that with the official Docker image?

  2. Aaron says:

    These steps gave me enough to figure out how to do something similar for the docker image. Create a persistent volume for /home/guacamole, from the docker host then create a symlink for ROOT.war to guacamole.war within /home/guacamole/tomcat/webapps/.

  3. Deadpan10 says:

    I stumbled across this while looking for a solution for docker…

    It seems the container start up script supports an Environment Var for it!

    Simply set:

    -e WEBAPP_CONTEXT=ROOT

  4. EbonMage says:

    Fantastic!
    Instaled guac natively on Unbuntu, then ran into this issue.
    Thank you for the help. I had to restart tomcat twice, then I was good to go.

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