Tomcat

Webapp Runner – Apache Tomcat as a Dependency

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John Simone, a fellow co-worker at Heroku, has created webapp-runner which provides an easy way to specify Tomcat as a dependency of your app and launch Tomcat. This is useful for making it simple to test your app locally but it also helps to avoid issues stemming from differences in runtime environments.

Here is how to use it from a Maven pom.xml build:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<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>org.example</groupId>
    <artifactId>hellojavawebapprunner</artifactId>
    <name>hellojavawebapprunner</name>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <packaging>war</packaging>

    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
            <artifactId>javax.servlet-api</artifactId>
            <version>3.0.1</version>
            <scope>provided</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.github.jsimone</groupId>
            <artifactId>webapp-runner</artifactId>
            <version>7.0.22</version>
            <scope>provided</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>

    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>2.2</version>
                <configuration>
                    <failOnMissingWebXml>false</failOnMissingWebXml>
                    <webappDirectory>${project.build.directory}/${project.artifactId}</webappDirectory>
                    <warName>${project.artifactId}</warName>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>2.4</version>
                <executions>
                    <execution>
                        <phase>package</phase>
                        <goals><goal>copy-dependencies</goal></goals>
                        <configuration>
                            <includeArtifactIds>webapp-runner</includeArtifactIds>
                        </configuration>
                    </execution>
                </executions>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>
</project>

Then just run the Maven build:

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