What is the default phase for tomcat7 maven plugin?

Question

I want my build process to deploy my war to a remote server. until now i have ran mvn clean install tomcat7:deploy

This seem wrong to me as it should probably be part of the deploy phase. But if I try to do a mvn deploy i get:

Deployment failed: repository element was not specified in the POM inside distributionManagement element or in -DaltDeploymentRepository=id::layout::url parameter

Since I haven't defined any repository to deploy to (I don't really want to deploy to a remote repository, just using this phase to execute the tomcat maven plugin...)

I want to be able to run the tomcat maven plugin without deploying to any remote repository. Is that possible ?

Answer 1

The plugin doesn't execute by default. You have to add an execution to it, or call it like you did(f.e. mvn clean install tomcat7:deploy).

The deploy on Tomcat has nothing to do with the Maven deploy phase/deploying to a remote repository.

To bind the Tomcat deployment to a certain phase, add something like this to your tomcat maven plugin configuration:

  <executions>
    <execution>
      <id>tomcat-deploy</id>
      <phase>pre-integration-test</phase>
      <goals>
        <goal>deploy</goal>
      </goals>
    </execution>
  </executions>

In this configuration, the deployment to Tomcat will occur in the pre-integration-test phase, which is the most common phase to do this in I believe.