java maven how to create app with bundled tomcat

Question

I wonder if this is a somewhat awkward way of thinking, but I couldn't really find any hint on the internet to my idea. Maybe I just did not phrase my question right, but anyhow, this is what I would like to do:

I have a complex application written in java with spring and quartz and a whole load of dependencies. The application is run inside an apache tomcat servlet container. Now I know, I can create a war file and deploy that to the productive server machine (after our internal IT has installed and configured the tomcat on that machine), but I would like to do this a bit different.

I would like maven to create a pre-packaged tomcat application server with all dependencies and configuration settings AND my application. In effect, all that would need to be done on the productive system is, copy the package (or zip or tar.gz or whatever is needed) to the server, unpack it in a directory of my or their choice and fire up this local isolated tomcat. It would only run my application (which poses enough load on the machine anyway) and I could even go so far and deploy a second variant, say for a different customer in the directory next to the first one. Neither of both could interfere with each other, even if they use different versions with different dependencies.

Is it possible to do that? Is it a desirable approach or am I on the completely wrong track here?

What I think would be a benefit of this approach (despite the thing with incompatible dependencies or settings between two or more different installations) is, that I can hand the whole package over to our administration guys and they can simply deploy it to a server without the need to configure anything in the tomcat after installing it and so on.

Any hint???

Answer 1

Create a Maven project as the parent project (type pom). Include your webapp as a module project (type war). Create another module project, maybe "myapp-standalone" (type jar) and include the Embeddable Tomcat as a dependency. Write a starter class to launch the internal Tomcat (see executable jar / überjar). When building the app, copy the created war file into the jar, into Tomcats webapp directoy.

Your launcher class needs to make sure, that the ports of the current Tomcat are not yet in use.