java - Remote deploy Tomcat webapp from Eclipse

Question

For development and testing purposes I'd like to deploy my webapp from within eclipse to a remote tomcat server. Is this possible ? If not, how should I set up my development environment for smooth and easy remote deployment ?

Answer 1

If you can access the Tomcat manager application remotely then you can use the Tomcat Ant tasks or Tomcat Maven plugin to handle this. Both of these can then be called from within Eclipse.

Using either Ant or Maven also gives you the advantage of being able to deploy from outside of Eclipse. In my experience separating deployment from the IDE is helpful (our sysadmins don't run Eclipse!).

My personal choice is Maven, but Ant is equally capable in this area. I also use Maven profiles to let me easily switch between local/remote deployment (different server, passwords, etc).