In this page, I will show you three different way to deploy applications

By Manager App

visit tomcat base url
localhost:8080
Click "Manager App"
You can deploy by specifying directory path or war file

By webapps dir

You can copy app files into webapps
If you look inside of conf/server.xml webapps attributes, you can see that tomcat automatically deploy application within webapps dir

By context.xml

Inside of conf/Catalina/localhost folder, create context.xml file and configue your app deployment.