Types of deployment

The deployment staging mode determines how deployment files are made available to the target servers that must deploy an application or standalone module. The Tomcat 7 server provides three different options for staging files listed as follows:

The following table describes the behavior and best practices for using the different deployment staging modes:

Ways of application deployment in Tomcat 7

Deployment of applications can be done in many ways in Tomcat 7. There are five different ways which are widely known and accepted in the various industries displayed in the following figure:

• War deployment: You can deploy the WAR file in the CATALINA_BASE directory of Tomcat and restart Tomcat to view the application. This approach is widely used in the production environment.
• Unpacked deployment: In this deployment method, the WAR file is extracted on the CATALINA_BASE directory for the instance. This method is commonly used in the development server.
• Tomcat Manager: It's a very good tool which is widely used in the production environment, mainly in remote infrastructure deployment. You can log in to the Tomcat browser from your system and deploy. Then click on the new web application deployment, as shown in the next screenshot:
  
  • You can create the context path using the Deploy tab. Click on Browse and select the required WAR file. Then click on Deploy. It will take 10 to 15 seconds to deploy the application and you will see a page similar to the following screenshot:
    
  • The following screenshot shows the application deployment status and administrative control such as Stop, Reload, and Undeploy:
    
  • Once the application is deployed successfully, as shown in the following screenshot, you can browse the application using the URL, http://localhost:8080/sample:
    
• Using ANT scripts: You can also deploy the application using the ANT scripts. These scripts contain the information of the source/destination and target file. For doing this deployment, the Tomcat instance should be running.
• TCD (Tomcat Deployer): It is a tool which is used for application deployment. ANT should be installed for the TCD to be working and the Tomcat instance should be running. There is no need to install he TCD on the Tomcat instance.