How do I package my web app and tomcat together using maven?

Question

I would like to distribute my application packaged as WAR embedded in Apache Tomcat. That is I want to distribute Tomcat along with my application.

How can this sort of distribution packaging can be done with Maven?

I have seen the Maven Cargo Plugin, but it appears to be geared towards deploying applications in containers locally. Perhaps an additional step over Cargo plugin is what I need. cargo:package appears to be interesting but lacks documentation.

Answer 1

Elaborating Tomasz's comment, you can do the following to achieve this.

1. Download and install tomcat to your local repository.

   mvn install:install-file -DgroupId=org.apache -DartifactId=tomcat -Dversion=7.0.10 -Dpackaging=zip -Dfile=/path/to/file

2. Use unpack goal of maven dependency plugin to unzip tomcat to a work folder

3. Use maven assembly plugin to place the application war in webapps folder and create a zip

You can refer to this pom.xml and this assembly descriptor.

Answer 2

A better way could be something as specified in the Heroku documentation (Though it should work on non-heroku apps as well)

To summarize (Just in case the link dies)

Tomcat embed package can give you a Tomcat API which you can refer in one of your main class,

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.embed</groupId>
    <artifactId>tomcat-embed-core</artifactId>
    <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
</dependency>

And you would need a main class something like,

package launch;

import java.io.File;
import org.apache.catalina.startup.Tomcat;

public class Main {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

        String webappDirLocation = "src/main/webapp/";
        Tomcat tomcat = new Tomcat();
        tomcat.setPort(8080);

        tomcat.addWebapp("/", new File(webappDirLocation).getAbsolutePath());
        System.out.println("configuring app with basedir: " + 
            new File("./" + webappDirLocation).getAbsolutePath());

        tomcat.start();
        tomcat.getServer().await();
    }
}