Running H2DB on Tomcat for Spark-Java Web App

Question

My Spark Java app runs perfectly fine on it's embedded Jetty server with all h2database connections working fine.

I packaged a war to run it on tomcat 8. However, once I deploy the war to tomcat. The connection to h2databse fails!!

How to fix this issue? This is my web.xml

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app version="3.0"
         xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd">
    <display-name>Hello</display-name>

    <filter>
        <filter-name>SparkFilter</filter-name>
        <filter-class>spark.servlet.SparkFilter</filter-class>
        <init-param>
            <param-name>applicationClass</param-name>
            <param-value>com.aqueel.project.Main</param-value>
        </init-param>
    </filter>
    <filter-mapping>
        <filter-name>SparkFilter</filter-name>
        <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    </filter-mapping>

</web-app>

Here is my Main class. The code fails only when I open sql2o connection. Which means tomcat cannot establish the connection while jetty server can.

String dataSource = "jdbc:h2:~/app123.db";

    String conString = dataSource + ";INIT=RUNSCRIPT from 'classpath:db/init.sql'";
    Sql2o sql2o = new Sql2o(conString, "", "");
    FoodDao foodDao = new Sql2oFoodDao(sql2o);
    Connection con = sql2o.open();
    Gson gson = new Gson();

    //GET MENU (ALL) works
    get("/delectable/menu", "application/json", (req, res) -> {
        res.status(200);
        return foodDao.findAll();
    }, gson::toJson);

Here is my build.gradle I used to package war file:

group 'com.aqueel.project'

apply plugin: 'java'
apply plugin: 'war'

sourceCompatibility = 1.8

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}

dependencies {

    compile "com.sparkjava:spark-core:2.5"
    compile "com.h2database:h2:1.4.191"
    compile "org.sql2o:sql2o:1.5.4"
    compile group: 'org.slf4j', name: 'slf4j-simple', version: '1.6.1'
    compile group: 'com.google.code.gson', name: 'gson', version: '2.3.1'
    testCompile group: 'junit', name: 'junit', version: '4.11'

}