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 is working properly at this point.

Now I want to add its own server.xml and tomcat-users.xml in the tomcat configuration. I read that I need to add the following lines.

 <serverXml>src/main/resources/tomcat/server.xml</serverXml>
 <tomcatUsers>src/main/resources/tomcat/tomcat-users.xml</tomcatUsers>

And that is fine. It is working now and tomcat is deployed using the configuration file above,but the problem is > Web application artifact is not deployed there (is not deployed automatically when I run tomcat7:run). It seems the artifact is not detected by the plugin and just starts the tomcat server without adding the artifact to the webapps just use the new config files.

I use this config.

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.maven</groupId>
    <artifactId>tomcat7-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.0</version>
    <executions>
          <execution>
            <id>tomcat-run</id>
            <goals>
              <goal>exec-war-only</goal>
            </goals>
            <phase>package</phase>
           <configuration>
        <url>http://localhost:8080/web-services</url>
        <path>/web-services</path>
        <serverXml>src/main/resources/tomcat/server.xml</serverXml>
                <tomcatUsers>src/main/resources/tomcat/tomcat-users.xml</tomcatUsers>
                   <warRunDependencies>
                    <warRunDependency>
                     <dependency>
                        <groupId>com.koitoer.webservices</groupId>
                        <artifactId>web-services</artifactId>
                        <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
                        <type>war</type>
                      </dependency>
                    <contextPath>/web-services</contextPath>
                </warRunDependency>
              </warRunDependencies>
    </configuration>
    </execution>
        </executions>
</plugin>

But tomcat starts deploy the webapp artifact but does not use the new config files.

What is the correct configuration there, I checked this post but nothing, this is possible or I should add the war file manually using tomcat manager?

Answer 1

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!

Answer 2

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.