There's alot of questions on different forums [1] [2] [3] about this topic but none seem to provide a definitive answer. I've tried different combinations suggested in the various posts but I have yet to succeed.
My goal is to make compiled source code in a standalone tomcat (8) reloadable - just like the embedded tomcat reloads newly complied sources in e.g. spring-boot or Grails. There are a few constraints that I need to comply with:
- No Grails or Spring-boot is available
- No Maven or Gradle is available
- The tomcat should read the exploded war file from an external location
To keep things simple I use a very simple JEE app with Spring MVC as POC for this before I move on to the real deal. The setup is as follows (for now):
- Exploded war builds into directory
target/exploded - Tomcat is setup with default settings except from
Context.xmlwhere the two lines regardingWatchedResourceare removed. Context is not set toreloadable="true". - The Tomcat server is run from within IntelliJ Idea (2016.3) like this:
where the "exploded" folder points to the target described above. And the "Server" tab like this:
The server starts up and the app is running fine. I then try to change some code, save it, and build a new exploded war file. I can see the class files change - but nothing is reloaded in tomcat.
Can anybody please elaborate? Is this approach even possible - in contrary to what many posts suggest? How is it possible in the embedded tomcat in e.g. Grails?