JBossDeveloper

You are free to submit a patch ;) you have access to the documentation sources.

Except the details about ROOT.war, i don't understand what is missing.
I already fixed the typo about "portal.web.context-root"

This:
"By default, the "main" page of JBoss portal will be accessible at http://localhost:8080/portal/index.html . You may want to change that either to a different name or to http://localhost:8080/index.html .
Note
To do so, edit the file $PORTAL_HOME/build/local.properties and change portal.web.context-root to anything you want.
Now you can rebuild JBoss portal and redeploy it for the context path changes to take effect."

is really the only required step to change a context path. (and of course avoid conflicts, don't bind 2 webapps on the same context).

So please let us know how you would change it, or even better submit a patch on the doco.

First thing is local.properties is not there unless you have built the portal once. Second is that 'rebuild' is actually first 'build clean' and then 'build deploy'. This might be obvious to some people but there are lots of people who need to build the source just to change the context root while knowing very little about building anything.

Then we should add that info but at another level, not for every configuration step that includes rebuilding or modifying the local.properties file.

Thanks.

Alternatively, you can go in to the portal-server.war/WEB-INF/jboss-web.xml and change it there:

 <context-root>/</context-root>