How to have expanded war in non-standard location

[Mark Nichols]

All -

I’m using Tomcat 7.0.59 on Ubuntu 12.04.4.

I’m also using Chef to manage the setup of the VM. The Chef resource I’m using 
to deploy my webapps produces a directory structure that looks like this:

../webapps
    /foo
        /current -> /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/foo/releases/2.1.0
        /releases
            /2.1.0
                / …

`current` is a symlink to the current version of the app. `releases` contains 
the current app and a prior version for rollback purposes.

In /etc/tomcat7/Catalina/localhost I have a context XML file named “foo.xml” 
that has this as it’s contents:

<?xml version=“1.0” encoding=“UTF-8”?>
<Context docBase=“/var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/foo/current” path=“/foo/app” />

When I start the container I get an error say

WARNING: A docBase /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/foo/current inside the host appBase 
has been specified, and will be ignored

I’ve tried setting appBase inside the host declaration in my server.xml to 
nothing (“”), and eliminating it entirely, both to no avail.

If I deploy the app under foo (eliminating the `releases` directory and the 
`current` symlink everything works as expected.

How do I combine appBase and docBase to properly map my application? Can I not 
have the directory structure described above?

Thanks
Mark