openxava / documentation / Deploy in production with Tomcat for OpenXava 6

If you're using OpenXava 7.0 or newer look at the new instructions

You can deploy your OpenXava 6.x (or older) applications in any Java application server with support for Servlet 3.0 or better. For this guide we're going to use Apache Tomcat to deploy your OpenXava application. Tomcat is the most used and robust Java application server, ideal for production environments.

Download and install Tomcat

Download Tomcat 9 from Apache. OpenXava also works fine with Tomcat 8 and 7. Uncompress Tomcat in a folder of your choice. Go to the webapps folder and remove all the folders inside: docs, examples, host-manager, manager and ROOT. They are example and management apps that you don't want to have in a production system.

The JDBC driver

You have to copy the JDBC driver jar to the lib folder of your Tomcat. If you're still using the HSQLDB database included with OpenXava, this jar is hsqldb.jar from OpenXava/lib. But if you're using MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc. you should obtain the correct JDBC driver for your database and copy it to Tomcat lib folder.

Create and deploy the WAR

In order to deploy your application into Tomcat you have to create a WAR file from your project. For that, click on right mouse button on build.xml file of your project and choose Run As > Ant Build...:

Then deselect any selected Ant target and select the createWar Ant target:

Additionally, you can put a better name like Invoicing.createWar in this case. Click on Run. Wait until the the Ant target execution finishes, afterwards get the file Invoicing.war (or YourApplicationName.war) and copy it to the webapps folder of your Tomcat. Your application is already deployed.

Run Tomcat

To start your Tomcat, with Windows click on the Start button, type cmd and press ENTER, then::

set JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk-11.0.3
cd tomcat-9.0.24\bin
startup

With Linux/Mac:

Configure against production database

By default your application goes against the same database you're using in development, the one defined in the datasource from web/META-INF/context.xml of your project. Most times you want to use a different database for production. To overwrite the database used by your application you have to define the datasource in the context.xml found in the conf folder of your Tomcat. For our example, we should edit tomcat-9.0.24/conf/context.xml and leave it in this way:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!-- The contents of this file will be loaded for each web application -->
<Context>

    <!-- Default set of monitored resources. If one of these changes, the    -->
    <!-- web application will be reloaded.                                   -->
    <WatchedResource>WEB-INF/web.xml</WatchedResource>
    <WatchedResource>WEB-INF/tomcat-web.xml</WatchedResource>
    <WatchedResource>${catalina.base}/conf/web.xml</WatchedResource>

    <!-- Uncomment this to disable session persistence across Tomcat restarts -->
    <!--
    <Manager pathname="" />
    -->
	
	 <Resource name="jdbc/InvoicingDS" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource"
	      maxTotal="20" maxIdle="5" maxWaitMillis="10000"
	      username="invoicing" password="sfh4tjdl" driverClassName="org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver"
	      url="jdbc:hsqldb:hsql://localhost:1999"/>
	
</Context>

We use InvoicingDS as datasource name, the same of the context.xml included in your WAR, but we define different url, username and password.