Tomcat - Not to deploy certain application on startup

If your Tomcat has too many application and you do not want some of the application to be automatically deployed on startup, you can use the deployIgnore tag mentioned in Tomcat Documentation

Basically, in the server.xml, add deployIgnore at the Host tag.

The above basically tell Tomcat not to deploy anything that matches a_app, b_app and c_app.

Reference

1) http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-8.0-doc/config/host.html#Common_Attributes