Using an Embedded Tomcat with Maven tomcat plugin

Francisco Ribeiro JuniorJanuary 24th, 2014Last Updated: January 24th, 2014

1 170 2 minutes read

When developing a java web application using the Eclipse WTP, we need to have an installation of tomcat in the machine in order to execute the application.

If you are using Maven on your project, you can use the tomcat plugin to run an embedded tomcat installation and test the application. It is very simple as you can see below.

OBS: To execute the steps given in this post you need to have installed in your eclipse the m2e plugin.

Create an Maven Project in eclipse, select the following maven archetype: maven-archetype-webapp
Insert the groupid and artifactid information

When you create a web project using this archetype, it already adds an index.jsp file.

Now we need to add the plugin information in the pom.xml as we can see below. In this example we are using the plugin for tomcat 7.x:

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/maven-v4_0_0.xsd">
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>br.com.xicojunior</groupId>
  <artifactId>test</artifactId>
  <packaging>war</packaging>
  <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <name>teste Maven Webapp</name>
  <url>http://maven.apache.org</url>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>junit</groupId>
      <artifactId>junit</artifactId>
      <version>3.8.1</version>
      <scope>test</scope>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
  <build>
    <finalName>test</finalName>
    <plugins>
	        <plugin>
	          <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.maven</groupId>
	          <artifactId>tomcat7-maven-plugin</artifactId>
	          <version>2.2</version>
	        </plugin>
	</plugins>
  </build>
</project>

The only change we made in the file was to add the section to add the tomcat 7 plugin.

After adding the plugin information, we can test it using the following maven goals:

clean install tomcat7:run

To execute those goals in eclipse:

Right Click in the project
Run as… -> Maven build…
Add the goals in the goals field
Click Run

Expect to see the following in the console:

[INFO] Running war on http://localhost:8080/test
[INFO] Creating Tomcat server configuration at C:\workspace\pessoal\redis\teste\target\tomcat
[INFO] create webapp with contextPath: /test
18/01/2014 17:43:53 org.apache.coyote.AbstractProtocol init
INFO: Initializing ProtocolHandler ["http-bio-8080"]
18/01/2014 17:43:53 org.apache.catalina.core.StandardService startInternal
INFO: Starting service Tomcat
18/01/2014 17:43:53 org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngine startInternal
INFO: Starting Servlet Engine: Apache Tomcat/7.0.47
18/01/2014 17:43:54 org.apache.tomcat.websocket.server.WsSci onStartup
INFO: JSR 356 WebSocket (Java WebSocket 1.0) support is not available when running on Java 6. To suppress this message, run Tomcat on Java 7, remove the WebSocket JARs from $CATALINA_HOME/lib or add the WebSocketJARs to the tomcat.util.scan.DefaultJarScanner.jarsToSkip property in $CATALINA_BASE/conf/catalina.properties. Note that the deprecated Tomcat 7 WebSocket API will be available. 
18/01/2014 17:43:54 org.apache.coyote.AbstractProtocol start
INFO: Starting ProtocolHandler ["http-bio-8080"]

Then we just need to test the given url in a browser, in my case: http://localhost:8080/test