openxava / documentation / Deploy in production with Tomcat

If you're using an OpenXava version older than 7.0 look at the old instructions

You can deploy your OpenXava applications in any Java application server with support for Servlet 3.1 or better. For this guide we're going to use Apache Tomcat to deploy your OpenXava application. Tomcat is the most used and robust Java application server, ideal for production environments.

Download and install Tomcat

Download Tomcat 9 from Apache. OpenXava also works fine with Tomcat 8 and Tomcat 10. Uncompress Tomcat in a folder of your choice. Go to the webapps folder and remove all the folders inside: docs, examples, host-manager, manager and ROOT. They are example and management apps that you don't want to have in a production system.

Create and deploy the WAR

In order to deploy your application into Tomcat you have to create a WAR file from your project. For that, click on right mouse button on your project and choose Run As > Maven build...:

In the dialog type package as goal:

Additionally, you can put a better name like invoicing package in this case. Click on Run. Wait until the the execution finishes.

Or if you have Maven installed in your computer and you prefer to use command line:

$ cd invoicing
$ mvn package

Afterwards get the file invoicing.war (or yourapplicationname.war) from target folder in your project and copy it to the webapps folder of your Tomcat. Your application is already deployed. Warning! For Tomcat 10 you have to create a folder called webapps-javaee inside Tomcat 10 folder and then copy the war file to that folder instead of webapps.

Run Tomcat

To start your Tomcat, with Windows click on the Start button, type cmd and press ENTER, then::

set JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk-11.0.3
cd tomcat-9.0.64\bin
startup

With Linux/Mac:

Configure against production database

By default your application goes against the same database you're using in development, the one defined in the datasource from src/main/webapp/META-INF/context.xml of your project. Most times you want to use a different database for production. To overwrite the database used by your application you have to define the datasource in the context.xml found in the conf folder of your Tomcat. For our example, we should edit tomcat-9.0.64/conf/context.xml and leave it in this way:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!-- The contents of this file will be loaded for each web application -->
<Context>

    <!-- Default set of monitored resources. If one of these changes, the    -->
    <!-- web application will be reloaded.                                   -->
    <WatchedResource>WEB-INF/web.xml</WatchedResource>
    <WatchedResource>WEB-INF/tomcat-web.xml</WatchedResource>
    <WatchedResource>${catalina.base}/conf/web.xml</WatchedResource>

    <!-- Uncomment this to disable session persistence across Tomcat restarts -->
    <!--
    <Manager pathname="" />
    -->
	
	 <Resource name="jdbc/invoicingDS" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource"
	      maxTotal="20" maxIdle="5" maxWaitMillis="10000"
	      username="invoicing" password="sfh4tjdl" driverClassName="org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver"
	      url="jdbc:hsqldb:hsql://localhost:1999"/>
	
</Context>

We use invoicingDS as datasource name, the same of the context.xml included in your WAR, but we define different url, username and password.