Tuesday 25 March 2008

Maven Webapps debug with Eclipse and Tomcat

I like using Maven. I also like using Step-Trace-Debugging. So here is what I do to accomplish this using Tomcat, Maven and Eclipse.

Required:
Steps:
  • Create or Import your maven project into Eclipse
  • Select File > Properties for this project
  • Select the Tomcat property
  • Check the box "Is a Tomcat Project"
  • Enter the context name. For my example, dcmdb
  • Click Apply
  • Go to /conf/Catalina/localhost and edit the context file i.e. dcmdb.xml.
    • Edit the docBase and workDir to point to the location of your maven project
    • Notice that the docbase should point to ../dcmdb/target/dcmdb-1.0 where
      • ../dcmdb = the location of my maven project
      • ../target/ = the directory that is created when using the maven package command
      • ../dcmdcb-1.0 = the directory that is my artifact name. It's the webapp
  • The final step involves changing the Java Build Path property in Eclipse by pointing the source output to /target/dcmdb-1.0/WEB-INF/classes. This means that once you make a change to your code all you need to do is restart tomcat.

1 comment:

Gubbi said...

Thanks for this helpful guide.
In the end the path for class output folder has a minor typo.