Tomcat directories explained

Here is brief summary of functions of various directories in tomcat
bin  : The bin directory contains the shell scripts and batch files for starting . We use mainly startup.sh to start the catalina. Internally it gives call to catalina.sh file to execute. The envorionment variables of JAVA_HOME , CATALINA_HOME are mandatory for tomcat catalina.sh to work.

conf : The conf directory contains the configuration files for Tomcat. These include general server configuration files, a default user list for file-based authentication and security for Web applications, and a global configuration

logs : The <TOMCAT_HOME>/logs directory contains the server logs.

lib : The <TOMCAT_HOME>/lib directory contains all the JAR files used by Tomcat.

webapps : This directory contains all the Web applications provided with Tomcat by default.
work : The work directory contains temporary files, precompiled JSP pages, and other intermediate files.

webapps : This is the place where we will place our war files . Tomcat automatically explodes them into directories. Tomcat also has applications of manager and host-manager which allows us to manage applications and hosts respectively.