Tomcat Maven Plugin

Concept

The purpose of this plugin is to provide Java Web Developers with a tool to easily deploy their changes to a locally installed Tomcat. At the moment the main benefits of such a plugin are that you can:

  • change a web resource (html, css, js, etc -- specified by a resources section) without having to build the entire project and then manually copy files around
  • build your module as usual and then have the produced jars copied to Tomcat's webapps/$myWebapp/WEB-INF/lib and have Tomcat restarted for you.
  • build your module as usual and then have the produced war copied to Tomcat's webapps
  • start/stop/restart your Tomcat
  • clean Tomcat work, logs, temp, webapps

At present there is a similar plugin developed and hosted at Codehaus. However, that plugin focuses on using the Tomcat manager application to manage web application as wars.