Deploying Web Applications

You can also notify Tomcat of a new context with the manager application deploy command invoked via the Ant deploy task. You can use the Ant deploy task to permanently deploy a context to Tomcat while Tomcat is running:

  <deploy url="url" path="mywebapp"
    war="file:/path/to/mywebapp.war"
    username="username" password="password" />

Unlike the install task, which can reference an unpacked directory, the deploy task requires a WAR. The task uploads the WAR to Tomcat and starts the application. You can deploy to a remote server with this task. Deploying an application is recommended operation when you have finished developing the application.

The following other deployment methods are also available, but they require you to restart Tomcat:

Copy a Web application directory or WAR to <JWSDP_HOME>/webapps.

Copy a configuration file named mywebapp.xml containing a context entry to <JWSDP_HOME>/webapps. The format of a context entry is described in the Server Configuration Reference at <JWSDP_HOME>/docs/tomcat/config/context.html. Note that the context entry implicitly specifies the location of the Web application files through its docBase attribute. For example, here is the context entry for the application discussed in Chapter 15:

  <Context path="/bookstore1"
    docBase="../../jwstutorial12/examples/web/
      bookstore1/build" debug="0">

Some of the example build files contain an Ant deploy target that invokes the Ant deploy task.