How can I deploy multiple wars using the tomcat plugin in maven?

Question

I have two wars which I deploy in two maven projects using tomcat plugin. I want to do this in one step and be able to deploy more than one war in a single maven project. Ho

Answer 1

I'm not in a position to test this, but there are two approaches I can think of. Either may work for you.

Option 1:

In one of the projects you can define the configuration for the tomcat plugin. In the snippet below there are two executions defined, both bound to the pre-integration-test phase (this might not be the best phase to do this, but it seems a good starting point as the war will have been packaged). Each execution will deploy the war defined in its configuration's warFile property.

  ...
  
    ...
    
      ...
      
        org.codehaus.mojo
        tomcat-maven-plugin
        1.0-beta-1
        
          
            deploy1
            pre-integration-test
            
              path/to/my/warFile1.war
            
            
              deploy
            
          
          
            deploy2
            pre-integration-test
            
              path/to/my/warFile2.war
            
            
              deploy
            
          
        
      
      ...
    
    ...
  
  ...

Option 2: This is probably the better approach. Define one execution in each war (you can omit the warFile element as the default can be used). You can then define a third project with a modules declaration referencing each war project. When the parent is built both wars will be be built and the wars deployed.

The modules declaration for the third project:

  relative/path/to/war1
  relative/path/to/war2

And the config for each war project:

  ...
  
    ...
    
      ...
      
        org.codehaus.mojo
        tomcat-maven-plugin
        1.0-beta-1
        
          
            deploy
            pre-integration-test
            
              deploy
            
          
        
      
      ...
    
    ...
  
  ...

---

Maven has some properties you can use to avoid absolute paths.

${maven.repo.local} will resolve to the local repository
${project.basedir} is the project directory (the root of the project)
${project.build.directory} is the build directory (default is "target")
${project.build.outputDirectory} is the directory where compilation output goes (default is "target/classes")