Run Mojo: run your Maven war project quickly !

When developping a war project, you usually build your war and deploy it to an installed Tomcat instance. This is time and resources consuming and take time to install locally the instance.

The run mojo give you the opportunity to save that by simply running your war inside an embeded Tomcat instance in your Maven build.

NOTE If you have a multi module Maven projects and use Maven3, you don't need to install all modules before use the run goal, just use tomcat6/7:run from the root module and the plugin will auto detect build output directory from various modules and replace dependencies with those directories in the webapp classloader.

Run an embeded Tomcat

Configure your pom with the plugin version (for other mojo parameters see each mojo documentation details).

And use: mvn tomcat6/7:run

  <plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.maven</groupId>
    <artifactId>tomcat7-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <!-- or if you want to use tomcat 6.x
    <artifactId>tomcat6-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    -->
    <version>2.0-beta-1</version>
    <configuration>
      <!-- http port -->
      <port>9090</port>
      <!-- application path always starts with /-->
      <path>/</path>
      <!-- optionnal path to a context file -->
      <contextFile>/Users/olamy/dev/tomcat-context-archiva-gmail.xml</contextFile>
      <!-- optionnal system propoerties you want to add -->
      <systemProperties>
        <appserver.base>/Users/olamy/dev/sources/tomcat/maven-plugin-svn/target/checkout/target/appserver-base</appserver.base>
        <appserver.home>/Users/olamy/dev/sources/tomcat/maven-plugin-svn/target/checkout/target/appserver-home</appserver.home>
        <derby.system.home>/Users/olamy/dev/sources/tomcat/maven-plugin-svn/target/checkout/target/appserver-base/logs</derby.system.home>
        <java.io.tmpdir>/Users/olamy/dev/sources/tomcat/maven-plugin-svn/target/checkout/target</java.io.tmpdir>
      </systemProperties>
      <!-- if you want to use test dependencies rather than only runtime -->
      <useTestClasspath>false</useTestClasspath>
      <!-- optionnal if you want to add some extra directories in the class loader -->
      <additionalClasspathDirs>
        <additionalClasspathDir></additionalClasspathDir>
      </additionalClasspathDirs>
    </configuration>
    <!-- if you need some extra dependencies only for running the embeded tomcat add them in the plugin dependencies -->
    <dependencies>
      <dependency>
        <groupId>org.apache.derby</groupId>
        <artifactId>derby</artifactId>
        <version>${derbyVersion}</version>
      </dependency>
      <dependency>
        <groupId>javax.mail</groupId>
        <artifactId>mail</artifactId>
        <version>1.4</version>
      </dependency>
    </dependencies>
  </plugin>

Maven project structure

  pom.xml             (top level pom with packaging pom)
  my-api/pom.xml      (api project with packaging jar)
  my-api-impl/pom.xml (api implementation project with packaging jar)
  my-webapp/pom.xml   (webapp project with packaging war)

With a such structure, from the top level directory use mvn tomcat6/7:run -pl :my-webapp -am.

Use it with selenium mojo

You can use the mojo, to start your application in a Tomcat instance and run you selenium test against this instance.

The following configuration will start an emdeded tomcat in pre-integration-test and stop it in post-integration-test.

  <plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.maven</groupId>
    <artifactId>tomcat7-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <!-- or if you want to use tomcat 6.x
    <artifactId>tomcat6-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    -->
    <version>2.0-beta-1</version>
    <executions>
      <execution>
        <id>tomcat-run</id>
        <goals>
          <goal>run-war-only</goal>
        </goals>
        <phase>pre-integration-test</phase>
        <configuration>
          ....
          <fork>true</fork>
          ....
        </configuration>
      </execution>
      <execution>
        <id>tomcat-shutdown</id>
        <goals>
          <goal>shutdown</goal>
        </goals>
        <phase>post-integration-test</phase>
      </execution>
    </executions>
  </plugin>