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:

• Eclipse Sysdeo Tomcat Plugin http://www.eclipseplugincentral.com/Web_Links-index-req-viewlink-cid-120.html
• Eclipse Maven Plugin

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.