How to undeploy a .war with Jenkins? - maven

Question

we are working on our Selenium Grid Setup.
We did it like this:
We got 2x Jenkins Jobs and 2x Tomcats.
We are using Maven!
First Jenkins Job deploys the application (to test) on a tomcat. This job got a post action where the second job is triggered. (of course with ignored testing)
Second Jenkins Job tests the application deployed on the first tomcat and if its successful it will deploy the application on the second and final Tomcat.
Now we need to undeploy the application on the first Tomcat if its deployed on the second one.
Is there any option to integrate this in the second Jenkins Job?
It would be nice if you could give me some advice.
Thank you
-T

Answer 1

Typically, the way to deploy and undeploy on Tomcat in an automated fashion is to use the Maven Tomcat plugin. Disregard the fact that it seems to be only for Tomcat version 7 - it will work the same for 7+.
Behind the scenes, this plugin utilizes the Tomcat manager REST API.
Your Jenkins commands would probably go like:
mvn tomcat7:deploy on first server
If the deploy and startup is successful, you'll get a verifiable response that looks like: "OK - Deployed application at context path /foo" (and likely the relative error code)
You could also write a curl and parse command
for the manager command at http://localhost:8080/manager/text/list
to check if the application deployed as a sanity check
If it deployed
Do a mvn tomcat7:deploy on the second server and
Do a mvn tomcat7:undeploy on
the first server.
Just for all of the information to be here, the basic maven configuration for this plugin is:
<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>/myAppContextPath</path>
<username>admin</username>
<password>admin</password>
</configuration>
</plugin>