Tomcat not booting up Gradle Webapp

Question

I have a Gradle webapp having plugin war and jetty defined in build.gradle, as follows:

apply plugin: 'java'
apply plugin: 'war'
apply plugin: 'jetty'

group = 'com.company'
sourceCompatibility = 1.8
targetCompatibility = 1.8
version = '1.0'
war.baseName = 'deploy'

repositories {
    mavenLocal()
    mavenCentral()
    maven { url "http://repository.pentaho.org/artifactory/repo/" }
}
dependencies {
    ..
}

When I perform a gradle build with jettyRunWar, as follows:

$ ./gradlew jettyRunWar

It build the application and deploy it to Jetty as expected.

Now I want to deploy the same application to Tomcat7 as well, to do the same, I ran the gradle war task as follows:

$ ./gradlew war

after running the task, I can see the deploy-1.0.war inside /Users/ArpitAggarwal/deploy/build/libs/ and when I tried to deploy it to Tomcat7, it's not picked up by Tomcat.

My question is - Do I need to apply any additional plugin to make the application deployable to Tomcat7?

Thanks.

No, You don't need any additional plugins, you should be able to deploy the same war to tomcat. Do you see any errors in tomcat startup?? I just created a war and deployed it to tomcat and it worked fine. — Nighthacks, Dec 26 '15 at 08:32
No errors in tomcat logs. Tomcat started fine without booting `.war`, I think Tomcat is not aware about `.war` file somehow. I tried with Eclipse as well, firstly "Add Web Module" is disabled and when I tried to add it using "Add External Web Module", it not picking up. — Arpit Aggarwal, Dec 26 '15 at 08:38
I too deploy wars generated by gradle war plug-in to tomcat regularly. But gradle war plug-in does not do it for me. It just produces a war file in my build directory. I use bash or other tools to deploy, and with Tomcat default installation you can just copy the war into .../webapps/ and let Tomcat deploy it. There is a tomcat plug-in for gradle intended to deploy war files. There may be other ways to do it. — joshp, Dec 26 '15 at 08:40
Ohh, i thought you are deploying it manually. `war` plug-in does not do that, it only creates a war file. So either you will have to deploy it manually or add some other plugin. — Nighthacks, Dec 26 '15 at 08:53
I tried deploying manually only but starting the server from Eclipse and `.war` was not picked up by Tomcat(not sure why), then I tried starting the server from command which works. But this give rise to another problem, for which I am writing an answer along with yours. — Arpit Aggarwal, Dec 26 '15 at 09:32
By manually means you need to copy it to tomcat webapps folder. — Nighthacks, Dec 26 '15 at 09:43

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 26 '15 at 08:59

1

war plug-in only creates a war, it doesn't deploy generated war to tomcat by itself.

You can create a task to deploy war to tomcat.

task deployToTomcat(type: Copy) {
    from war.archivePath
    into "${tomcatHome}/webapps"
}

You can also use gradle-tomcat-plugin.

answered Dec 26 '15 at 08:59

Nighthacks

410
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It's the answer to my next question, which I am about to ask ;) – Arpit Aggarwal Dec 26 '15 at 09:33

score -1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 26 '15 at 09:46

The problem is contextRoot of .war file. Gradle generates the contextRoot of .war file picking the war.baseName and version, so the contextRoot is changed to deploy-1.0 and the application is accessible at:

localhost:8080/deploy-1.0

Then I removed the version field from build.gradle which makes Gradle generate .war with contextRoot as deploy and application accessibility at:

localhost:8080/deploy/

Tomcat not booting up Gradle Webapp

2 Answers2