What is the purpose of tomcat-maven-plugin? - maven

Question

I'm having some difficulty understanding the purpose of this plugin. Is it to modify the settings in Tomcat during the build?
I am deploying to tomcat using maven, without the plugin and it seems to work fine. Not sure if I am missing something
Cheers

Answer 1

Maven Tomcat plugin basically just bootstraps an embedded Tomcat container for you. Saves you the trouble of configuring an external Tomcat instance for development purposes. It can also auto-start this Tomcat instance during the build and run integration tests on it, stopping it afterwards.
If you already have a functioning workflow that you're comfortable with, no need to introduce the plugin, but it's pretty easy to configure, can run multiple web apps, can run unassembled applications etc so it's convenient to have for local development.
An even more light-weight alternative would be the Jetty plugin which starts an embedded Jetty server instead.

Answer 2

Maven is actually a plugin execution framework where every task is actually done by plugins.
Maven Plugins are generally used to :
create jar file
create war file
compile code files
unit testing of code
create project documentation
create project reports
A plugin generally provides a set of goals and which can be executed using following syntax:
mvn [plugin-name]:[goal-name]
For example, a Java project can be compiled with the maven-compiler-plugin's compile-goal by running following command
mvn compiler:compile
for more information go to http://www.tutorialspoint.com/maven/maven_plugins.htm
so pulgins is used to execute goals.
suppose if you don't include plugin that is required in your execution environment then it will throw an error like
A required class is missing: Lorg/apache/maven/plugin/BuildPluginManager;
so by adding appropriate plugin in pom.xml it will resolve the dependencies and execute the goal succesfully.
to remove above error just add the following plugins :
<plugin>
<groupId>com.atlassian.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-amps-plugin</artifactId>
<version>${amps.version}</version>
<extensions>true</extensions>
</plugin>

Answer 3

Maven is a framework used to build JAVA applications, it provides the following
Directory Structure
Configuration Files
Build Settings
It helps in easy and structured development, primarily used for REST API Calls.
Applications built on Maven Framework, would require the same to be deployed
Its better that you get the plugin installed, since on a long run you never know what dependency may go missing
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