Republish Tomcat Server in Eclipse without complete Restart

Question

In my Eclipse I have created a Dynamic Web Project, which runs on a Tomcat7. If I modify and save any file in the project, eclipse automatically republishes the project on the Tomcat (copies files in a temporary Tomcat directory) and restarts the Tomcat. This means I loose all sessions.

Is there a way to tell eclipse to automatically copy modified files in the Tomcat directory but only restart the Tomcat when manually restarting Tomcat?

Even better would be: Copy any modified files in Tomcat directoy but restart Tomcat only when I modified a file with extention *.java

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

You should start Tomcat in hot deploy mode (supported only in debug mode). There is a good guide for this here.