tomcat-maven-plugin with multiple modules building one war only

Question

I try to build a web application based on multiple maven modules. One of the modules is called "web" and is solely responsible to package a war which should be deployed to a tomcat using the tomcat7-maven-plugin. I have following modules defined in my parent.pom:

• common
• persistence
• persistence-embedded
• service
• rest
• web

All of them are combined into one web-application-war, the web module has set packaging to war. The problem is, that my war file is deployed for each submodule (and the main-parent-module) over and over again when I run mvn tomcat7:redeploy, which leads to 7 deployments. Apparently, this is not how it should be. The tomcat7-maven-plugin configuration currently looks like this:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.maven</groupId>
    <artifactId>tomcat7-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.2</version>
    <configuration>
        <ignorePackaging>true</ignorePackaging>
        <url>http://localhost:8080/manager/text</url>
        <server>tomcatServer</server>
        <path>/webapp</path>
        <warFile> /home/username/dev/maven-multimodule-example/web/target/maven-multimodule-example-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war</warFile>
        <username>admin</username>
        <password>password</password>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

As you can see, I need to specify the warFile (which is not a solution but rather a hack, because I can't use ${project.basedir} which would lead to the submodule-dir) to make it work.

However, if I run the web application with mvn tomcat7:run, it looks quite good, because the other non-war-building modules are skipped by the plugin.

How can I configure the plugin the right way to deploy the war file only once?

Answer 1

Every configuration within the <build> section of a parent POM will be inherited and thus executed in all child modules. So if you want to deploy only once, add it to only one POM (eg the web POM).

Answer 2

Thanks to dunni's help I noticed my missunderstanding of how multimodule projects are built. Now I've placed the plugin configuration in the web module and added an execution, bound to the install phase so that I can rebuild the whole project and get it deployed to my tomcat. Obviously maven takes care of the right execution order of the modules.

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.maven</groupId>
    <artifactId>tomcat7-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.2</version>
    <configuration>
        <url>http://localhost:8080/manager/text</url>
        <server>tomcatServer</server>
        <path>/webapp</path>
        <warFile>${project.basedir}/target/${project.parent.artifactId}-${project.parent.version}.war</warFile>
        <username>admin</username>
        <password>password</password>
    </configuration>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>redeployafterinstall</id>
            <phase>install</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>redeploy</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>