Spring Boot Project Deployment Using Tomcat

Deploying a Spring Boot project to Apache Tomcat is a common practice when you want to run your Spring Boot application in a traditional servlet container. Here are the steps to deploy a Spring Boot project using Tomcat:

Step 1: Create a Spring Boot Project

If you haven’t already, create a Spring Boot project using Spring Initializr or your preferred development environment.

Step 2: Modify the Project Configuration

1. Open your pom.xml file (Maven) or build.gradle (Gradle) and ensure that you have the necessary dependencies. Make sure that you have the spring-boot-starter-web dependency, which is required for web applications. For Maven:

   <dependencies>
       <!-- ... other dependencies ... -->
       <dependency>
           <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
           <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
       </dependency>
   </dependencies>

For Gradle:

   dependencies {
       // ... other dependencies ...
       implementation 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web'
   }

2. By default, Spring Boot uses an embedded servlet container (e.g., Tomcat) for running web applications. To make your application deployable to an external Tomcat server, you need to mark the embedded container as “provided” to prevent it from being packaged into the final WAR file. To do this, add the following configuration to your pom.xml (Maven) or build.gradle (Gradle): For Maven:

   <build>
       <plugins>
           <plugin>
               <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
               <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
               <configuration>
                   <excludeDevtools>false</excludeDevtools>
               </configuration>
           </plugin>
       </plugins>
   </build>

For Gradle:

   configurations {
       providedRuntime
   }

   dependencies {
       providedRuntime 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-tomcat'
   }

Step 3: Create a WAR File

Spring Boot applications can be packaged as WAR (Web Application Archive) files for deployment to external servlet containers like Tomcat. To build a WAR file, use the following steps:

For Maven:

mvn clean package

For Gradle:

./gradlew build

This command will generate a WAR file in the target (Maven) or build/libs (Gradle) directory of your project.

Step 4: Deploy to Tomcat

1. Copy the generated WAR file (e.g., my-application.war) from the target or build/libs directory to the Tomcat webapps directory.
2. Start or restart your Tomcat server.
3. Your Spring Boot application should be automatically deployed by Tomcat. You can access it at http://localhost:8080/your-war-file-name where your-war-file-name is the name of your WAR file without the .war extension.

Step 5: Access Your Application

Open a web browser and navigate to the URL where your Spring Boot application is deployed on Tomcat. You should be able to access and interact with your application.

That’s it! You’ve successfully deployed a Spring Boot application to Apache Tomcat. You can now access and use your application in a production environment.