Deploying WAR to multiple Tomcat instances

Question

I'm wondering if anyone can point me to some links and/or scripts that deal with deploying a web application to multiple Tomcat instances without much disruption in service.

Currently we have an F5 Load Balancer between 2 Apache servers and the app requests are proxy'd through to tomcat using mod_proxy. Pretty standard stuff. When I need to redeploy the latest changes, I create the WAR file and then SCP it to both web servers. I shut one tomcat instance down, throw the new war out there, start it back up. Then do the same for the other server.

I'm looking for something a bit more automated than this process. Any help is appreciated.

UPDATE: I've stumbled on this jenkins plugin . Would this be a good approach? And FYI, I'm not using Maven. I'm not opposed to a possible Gradle solution, however.

Answer 1

Have a look at http://blog.kwatee.net/2011/05/deploy-web-application-on-multiple.html There's a REST API that let's you script it for your specific automation needs.