Run Tomcat and deploy project with own server.xml

Question

I just want to run a web project that has been configured in a maven project with the pom.xml. It uses the maven tomcat7-maven-plugin to deploy the web app artifact and all

Answer 1

I have added the following into server.xml and my application is working fine with tomcat7:run-war command:

<Host appBase="webapps" autoDeploy="true" deployXML="false"
    name="localhost" unpackWARs="true">
    <Context docBase="../../webApplicationName"
        path="/webApplicationName" reloadable="true" />
    <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve"
        directory="logs"
        prefix="localhost_access_log." suffix=".txt"
        pattern="%h %l %u %t &quot;%r&quot; %s %b" />
</Host>

Here is how I configure plug-in in pom.xml

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.maven</groupId>
    <artifactId>tomcat7-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.2</version>

    <configuration> 
        <path>/</path>
        <serverXml>src/main/tomcatconf/server.xml</serverXml>
        <warDirectory>target/appName</warDirectory>
        <webapps> 
            <webapp> 
                <groupId>com.abc</groupId> 
                <artifactId>appName</artifactId> 
                <version>7.0.1</version> 
                <type>war</type>    
            </webapp> 
        </webapps> 
    </configuration>

    <dependency>
        <groupId>commons-logging</groupId>
        <artifactId>commons-logging</artifactId>
        <version>1.1.1</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
        <artifactId>jcl-over-slf4j</artifactId>
        <version>1.5.5</version>
    </dependency>
</plugin>

I have dropped server.xml + other config files into src/main/tomcatconf directory (default value of plugin) and also have context.xml into META-INF dir and into src/main/tomcatconf. The plugin seems to be picking up context.xml from one of the directories.

Hope this works for you.

Answer 2

I think you can try this configuration

<project>
  ...
  <build>
    <finalName>servidor-identidades-webapp</finalName>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>tomcat-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>1.1</version>
        <configuration>
          <server>myserver</server>
          <url>http://127.0.0.1:8080/manager</url>
          <path>/servidor-identidades-webapp</path>
          <warSourceDirectory>C:/Users/fulanis/workspace2/web/target/servidor-identidades-webapp.jar</warSourceDirectory>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
</project>

Ref: https://wiki.base22.com/display/btg/How+to+create+a+Maven+web+app+and+deploy+to+Tomcat+-+fast

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

The tomcat7-maven-plugin documentation says for <serverXml>:

server.xml to use Note if you use this you must configure in this file your webapp paths.

I think this means that you have to insert a <Context> element with the path of your war inside the <Host> element, like so:

<Host appBase="webapps" autoDeploy="true" deployXML="false" name="localhost" unpackWARs="true">
    <Context docBase="../../webapp" path="/webapp" reloadable="true" />
</Host>

Where "webapp" is my generated war name. Apparently, appBase is relative to target/tomcat (and "webapps" seems to be the default value). docBase is relative to appBase so for simplicity I used the relative path to the build directory.

This is working for me, and without that <Context> element I get a white page.

If you are using filtering you can probably replace docBase by a property. However take care to exclude the server.xml (and tomcat-users.xml) from your war file!