Deploying Spring WAR to Tomcat-based docker

Question

I have followed through Spring's Building a RESTful Web Service tutorial and created a dummy webapp (with "Build with Maven" instructions). I build and package the WAR. Then I run it with this command:

java -jar ./target/Dummy-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war

I can see the dummy JSON endpoint at http://localhost:8080/greeting/.

Now I want to containerize the app with Docker so I can further test it without the needs to install Tomcat to system space. This is the Dockerfile I created:

FROM tomcat:7-jre8-alpine

# copy the WAR bundle to tomcat
COPY /target/Dummy-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war /usr/local/tomcat/webapps/app.war

# command to run
CMD ["catalina.sh", "run"]

I build and run the docker binding to http://localhost:8080. I can see the Tomcat welcome page on "http://localhost:8080". But I couldn't see my app on neither:

How should I track down the issue? What could be the problem?

Update 1: The Tomcat admin interface screenshot

What does http://localhost:8080/manager/html say? Is the app sucessfully deployed? — Luciano van der Veekens, Jul 05 '17 at 07:47
@LucianovanderVeekens It seems to be deployed successfully. See the screenshot I added above. — Koala Yeung, Jul 05 '17 at 07:58
@khmarbaise: Catalina logs show that the WAR deployed successfully. — Koala Yeung, Jul 05 '17 at 08:00
@StanislavL: Yup. The port mapping is correct. I can see the Tomcat default landing page and manager with no problem. But when I try to visit the WAR path (see the paths I tried in the original post), they all give me a Tomcat standard 404 page. — Koala Yeung, Jul 05 '17 at 08:14
Could be it's not real war file? Because you run it to test as a springboot jar (the only diff is the file name). Try to setup tomcat locally and manually copy the war to webapps. Guess structure of the war could be wrong - e.g. missing web.xml or something like this. — StanislavL, Jul 05 '17 at 08:20

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 05 '17 at 10:06

The Application.java file in the example looks like this:

package hello;

import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;

@SpringBootApplication
public class Application {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
    }
}

This is a valid SpringBoot application, but NOT a deployable application to Tomcat. To make it deployable, you can can:

redefineApplication to extend SpringBootServletInitializer from Spring framework web support; then

override the configure method:

package hello;

import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.builder.SpringApplicationBuilder;
import org.springframework.boot.web.support.SpringBootServletInitializer;    

@SpringBootApplication
public class Application extends SpringBootServletInitializer {

    @Override
    protected SpringApplicationBuilder configure(SpringApplicationBuilder application) {
        return application.sources(Application.class);
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
    }

}

No need to change the pom.xml file (or any other configurations).

After rebuilding the dockerfile and run it with proper port binding, the greeting example endpoint will be available through: http://localhost:8080/app/greeting/

Deploying Spring WAR to Tomcat-based docker

Update 1: The Tomcat admin interface screenshot

1 Answers1

References