How to Install & Deploy a java app (.jsp file) in apache tomcat

Question

I have successfully installed apache tomcat & verified it to be working using the curl command

curl http://localhost:8080/

Tomcat is installed in

   /var/lib/tomcat8/
                   webapps/ROOT/index.html
                   webapps/ROOT/META-INF
                   lib

I have received following structure of the java app in a zip file

App/
   build.xml
   deploy.sh
   run.sh
   www/
      *.jsp files
      WEB-INF/lib/*.jar files

I want to install and run this app on my server. How can I do that. Specifically I want to know where to place these folders. Do I need to run any of the deploy or build files. Do i need to install the jar files? If I directly run one of the .jsp files from curl command, it crashes due to missing java class.

Perhaps I am missing something obvious but I am new to java env and could not find it from google.

Answer 1

If you haven't tried it yet, consider using Maven to build your projects.

This will automate and simplify a lot of similar work for you, like creating a .war file and deploying your project to Tomcat. With Maven, you have to set the <packaging>war</packaging> in pom.xml (a project configuration file) and run mvn tomcat7:deploy command.

For details look at the above link to Maven docs or for instance check out this tutorial.

You can also use the Tomcat Manager under (default) http://localhost:8080/manager to deploy the .war file manually.