In my application.yml I set
server:
tomcat:
basedir: /home/user/TOMCAT
when I run the application with mvn spring-boot:run I see that the folder is created and it has this structure
/TOMCAT/work/Tomcat/localhost/ROOT
and it is completely empty.
I was expecting to find here a webapps folder and so on. It may sound stupid but, where are all tomcat-related files?
Your tomcat related files are in you spring-boot jar. The directory from which that jar is executed is treated as "catalina.home", while the "basedir" is treated as "catalina.base". The basedir may contain any type of "work" that your application will do that might require writing to disk, such as buffering large files or acting as the relative location for local application logs.