Deploying a .war application on a tomcat server

I am trying to deploy my hello.war file (Java application) on my tomcat server.

At first I do it from the "Manager App" on tomcat's default page, and it shows off afterwards in the Applications section. (Attached below circled in red)

enter image description here

But when I try to connect to it by clicking on that link (https://ip-address/hello) it gives me a standard "HTTP Status 404 – Not Found" with the description: "The origin server did not find a current representation for the target resource or is not willing to disclose that one exists." (picture below)

enter image description here

I even try putting my hello.war file manually in the server in the appropriate folder location ("/opt/tomcat/apache-tomcat-9.0.33/webapps") and add read, execute permissions to 'others' on the .war file, add user 'tomcat' as the owner of the file, restart the service. But still nothing seems to help and I still get that 404

Solution

It means you do not have a default start page in the application. Create index.html under WebContent and refresh the page. For testing, you can put any content in index.html e.g.

<html>
    <head>
        <title>Hello world</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        Welcome to my application
    </body>
</html>

Check this to learn more about it.

[Update]

--- Posting the following update based on another request (check comments) from OP ---

As I have mentioned in the comment, you need to forward the request to a JSP (e.g. queryResults.jsp) where you want to show the query result. Put the following code at the end in the doGet method of your servlet:

String nextJSP = "/queryResults.jsp";
RequestDispatcher dispatcher = getServletContext().getRequestDispatcher(nextJSP);
dispatcher.forward(request,response);

This code will automatically forward the request to queryResults.jsp where you can access the query result saved in the request/session object.

Feel free to comment in case of any doubt/issue.