Introduction to Tomcat Web Application

Deployment is the term used for the process of installing a web application (either a 3rd party WAR or your own custom web application) into the Tomcat server.

Web application deployment may be accomplished in a number of ways within the Tomcat server.

• Statically; the web application is setup before Tomcat is started
• Dynamically; by directly manipulating already deployed web applications (relying on auto-deployment feature) or remotely by using the Tomcat Manager web application

The Tomcat Manager is a web application that can be used interactively (via HTML GUI) or programmatically (via URL-based API) to deploy and manage web applications.

There are a number of ways to perform deployment that rely on the Manager web application. Apache Tomcat provides tasks for Apache Ant build tool. Apache Tomcat Maven Plugin project provides integration with Apache Maven. There is also a tool called the Client Deployer, which can be used from a command line and provides additional functionality such as compiling and validating web applications as well as packaging web application into web application resource (WAR) files.