Starting and stopping tomcat6 with maven before/after deploy

[Rebecca Hopper]

I am a maven newbie, and it's going fairly well, except that I have been unable to get maven to start tomcat after deploying. I see in the documentation that you can do it with the tomcat-maven-plugin, but that uses the Tomcat Manager, which we don't use in our shop. Is there some way to just call the tomcat start.bat directly via maven?

Here's the relevant portion of my pom.xml, which is getting the error that it can't connect to the Tomcat Manager, probably because it is not configured correctly. Do I really need Tomcat Manager to do this?

  <plugin>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>tomcat-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <configuration>
          <path>/webapps/app_name/app_name.war</path>
        </configuration>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <id>stop-tomcat</id>
            <phase>clean</phase>
            <goals>
              <goal>start</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
              <server>localhost</server>
              <char>utf-8</char>
              <path>/webapps/app_name</path>
            </configuration>
          </execution>
          <execution>
            <id>start-tomcat</id>
            <phase>deploy</phase>
            <goals>
              <goal>start</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
              <url>http://localhost:8080/manager</url>
              <server>localhost</server>
              <char>utf-8</char>
              <path>/webapps/app_name</path>
            </configuration>
          </execution>
        </executions>
      </plugin>  

[Uli Hofstoetter]

Maybe the Maven exec plugin can do the job.

Regards,
Uli

[Rebecca Hopper]

That worked perfectly. I guess it might seem obvious when you have been using maven for awhile, but I still don't know all the plugins.

I bound start-tomcat to the pre-clean phase and stop-tomcat to the deploy phase.

     
<plugin>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>exec-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>1.1</version>
        <executions>
          <execution>
            <id>stop-tomcat</id>
            <phase>pre-clean</phase>
            <goals>
              <goal>exec</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
            <executable>${user.tomcat.stop}</executable>
            </configuration>
          </execution>
          <execution>
            <id>start-tomcat</id>
            <phase>deploy</phase>
            <goals>
              <goal>exec</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
            <executable>${user.tomcat.start}</executable>  
            </configuration>
          </execution>
        </executions>
      </plugin>
 

Thanks, Uli for the quick response!