How to start and stop Tomcat from ANT

This approach is not based on the Tomcat Ant Tasks or a brute force <exec dir=”${tomcat.home}/bin” executable=”startup.bat”/> kind of approach.

After wading through startup.bat and catalina.bat I figured that they boil down to the following:

<target name="tomcat-start">
    <java jar="${tomcat.home}/bin/bootstrap.jar" fork="true">
        <jvmarg value="-Dcatalina.home=${tomcat.home}"/>
    </java>
</target>

<target name="tomcat-stop">
    <java jar="${tomcat.home}/bin/bootstrap.jar" fork="true">
        <jvmarg value="-Dcatalina.home=${tomcat.home}"/>
        <arg line="stop"/>
    </java>
</target>

You can have in build.properties, something like the following entry:

tomcat.home=E:/peter/opt/apache-tomcat-5.5.12

It works great and in Eclipse and NetBeans the stack traces within the log window hyperlink to the source code just as you would expect. You would normally combine these ant targets with a “war” task. The Tomcat Reload Ant task can also be used to speed up development time.

One of the advantages of this approach is that you can extend it to start Tomcat for remote debugging

<target name="tomcat-start-debug">
    <java jar="${tomcat.home}/bin/bootstrap.jar" fork="true">
        <jvmarg value="-Dcatalina.home=${tomcat.home}"/>
        <jvmarg value="-Xdebug"/>
        <jvmarg
value="-Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8000,server=y,suspend=n"/>
    </java>
</target>

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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Why you should use the Maven Ant Tasks instead of Maven or Ivy
• Starting and Stopping Tomcat from Ant