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I have been pondering a lot lately over, why should one use tomcat manager to deploy/undeploy wars to your server?

What are the advantages/disadvantages of the same over simply copy-it-to-webapps-folder approach, and delete-it-from-webpass-folder approach??

Also, are there any other advantages regarding cleanup process by tomcat , when a war is deleted? i.e is the process of cleanup different, when a dev deletes a .war , and when he undeploys a webapp using the manager??

Also, would the process be different If I use ant with TCD?

Some light on this would be really helpful.

Neeraj
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  • i cant give a detailed answer but we are using our java webapp (which is a CMS) on dozens of apache with tomcat webservers with hundreds of websites and i have never ever used the tomcat manager. the only advantage i´ve heard about is the possibility to reload classes and libs with tomcat manager. but this functionality should be disabled on production environments anyway. – felixsigl Mar 22 '11 at 14:21

3 Answers3

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Also, are there any other advantages regarding cleanup process by tomcat , when a war is deleted? i.e is the process of cleanup different, when a dev deletes a .war , and when he undeploys a webapp using the manager??

internally it does the same thing. just it provides UI so that we can easily and|or easily & remotely, do the deployment/undeployment and other admin stuff

jmj
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One obvious advantage of using the manager is that with it, you do not need to grant OS-level privileges to everyone who manages the applications. You can just grant access to the manager UI and allow users to start / stop / deploy / undeploy applications from there, but they will still gain no access to the underlying OS (at least not anything the Tomcat user does not have access to).

It of course depends on your situation if the above is significant or meaningless. Other than that, the browser UI of the manager is easier to use for some people.

Tommi
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I use Tomcat Manager (TM) together with Ant, so my comment applies to this combination.

One of the conveniences for me is that by using Ant/TM I can not only deploy, but also undeploy or update webapps without restarting. I don't think this is possible to do by simply deleting .war or exploded directory.

mindas
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  • In standard configuration, Tomcat monitors its webapps folder and deploys any webapp for which you copy a .war file into the webapps folder, and undeploys it if you remove the .war file, and re-deploys it when you change the .war file. But when doing that, you don't get automatic feedback about the success of a deployment, which you do get from the Tomcat Manager. – Christian Semrau Mar 22 '11 at 20:49