Running a web project with Tomcat

Tomcat is a popular open source application server. The Maven Tomcat plugin supports the ability to build and deploy Maven projects in Tomcat. In fact, there are two Maven Tomcat plugins, one for Tomcat 6 and another for Tomcat 7.

Let us look at how to run a web project with Tomcat 7. The steps will be identical for Tomcat 6, except that the plugin would be tomcat6-maven-plugin instead of tomcat7-maven-plugin, and the plugin prefix would be tomcat6 instead of tomcat7.

How to do it...

1. Open a simple web project (simple-web-project).

2. Run the following Maven command:

   mvn org.apache.tomcat.maven:tomcat7-maven-plugin:run
   

3. Observe the result:

   

4. Browse to the deployed webapp by visiting http://localhost:8080/simple-webapp:

   

How it works...

The Maven Tomcat plugin allows web applications to be deployed and tested using Apache Tomcat. The run goal is bound to the package phase. Maven runs all the phases prior to it.

Tomcat uses default values to start the server.

Tip

As this is...