Apache Tomcat plugin for Grails

grails install-plugin tomcat

The regular Grails commands like run-app etc. will operate against Tomcat instead of Jetty. No other installation of an external Tomcat distribution is required.

The following two features (JNDI/remote deployment) require the latest 1.2-SNAPSHOT version of the plugin:

grails install-plugin tomcat 1.2-SNAPSHOT

Configuration Options

• tomcat.deploy.username - The username of the remote tomcat to deploy to
• tomcat.deploy.password - The password for the remote tomcat to deploy to
• tomcat.deploy.url - The remote tomcat deploy URL
• tomcat.scan.enabled (since 2.0.1) - Where Servlet 3.0 annotation classpath scanning is enabled (false by default). Note that enabling this setting will require you to significantly increase your memory settings as the Servlet 3.0 scanning feature consumes a large amount of memory.
• tomcat.scan.excludes (since 2.0.1) - If class path scanning is enabled, what jars to limit
• tomcat.nio - Whether to enable the Tomcat New IO connector
• tomcat.keystorePath - The path to the Tomcat keystore for HTTPS
• tomcat.keystorePassword - The password for the keystore for HTTPS
• tomcat.jvmArgs - Any JVM arguments to pass to the isolated Tomcat instance used for run-war
• tomcat.startupTimeoutSecs - The time to wait for startup for the isolated Tomcat instance

JNDI

You can specify JNDI naming entries to be used by the embedded Tomcat in your grails-app/conf/Config.groovy file:

grails.naming.entries = ['jdbc/mydb': [
	type: "javax.sql.DataSource", //required
        auth: "Container", // optional
        description: "Data source for ...", //optional
        //properties for particular type of resource
	url: "jdbc:oracle:thin:@dbserver:1521:DBNAME",
	username: "dbuser",
	password: "secret",
	driverClassName: "oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver",
	maxActive: "8", //and so on
        maxIdle: "4"
	]
]

These can then be looked up by configuring an appropriate Spring bean in @grails-app/conf/resources.groovy@:

beans = {
  xmlns jee:"http://www.springframework.org/schema/jee"
  jee.'jndi-lookup'(id:"myDbDataSource", 'jndi-name':"java:comp/env/jdbc/mydb")
}

Note if you deploy to a standalone Tomcat instance then these with need to be configured in your Tomcat context.xml file as per the Tomcat documentation

Remote Deployment

The plugin features remote deployment Gant scripts. To deploy the current Grails application simply run:

grails tomcat deploy

To undeploy run:

grails tomcat undeploy

Note you will need to configure permissions in your tomcat-users.xml directory such as:

<role rolename="manager"/>
<user username="manager" password="secret" roles="standard,manager"/>

You can then need to specify the username/password (and potentially url) in your Config.groovy file:

tomcat.deploy.username="manager"
tomcat.deploy.password="secret"
tomcat.deploy.url="http://myserver.com/manager"

Tomcat 7

If you are using Tomcat 7, ensure the user has the manager-script role

<user name="manager" password="secret" roles="manager-script" />

And the configuration in Config.groovy looks like

tomcat.deploy.username="manager"
tomcat.deploy.password="secret"
tomcat.deploy.url="http://myserver.com/manager/text"

A: In your application.properties, set your app.name=ROOT

Q: Error executing script Tomcat: : java.io.IOException: Server returned HTTP response code: 403 for URL: http://localhost:8080/manager/deploy?path=/myapp

A: Depends on the version of Tomcat you are using:

In Tomcat 6.x and earlier versions the manager URL for deploying was:

http://localhost:8080/manager

But in Tomcat 7 it changed and now looks like

environments {
  development {
    tomcat.deploy.username="tomcat"
    tomcat.deploy.password="tomcat"
    tomcat.deploy.url="http://localhost:8080/manager/text"
  }
}

<role rolename="manager-script"/>
  <user username="tomcat" password="tomcat" roles="manager-script"/>