The Eclipse server plugin can be used to create a tomcat6x server inside your eclipse workspace.
Before adding a server and / or a runtime to the eclipse configuration, the plugin checks for an already configured instance of a tomcat6x server or an identical runtime configuration. If a corresponding runtime and / or server is already configured inside eclipse, this one will not be overwritten.
Here is a sample configuration. The required parameter is workspace which should point to your current eclipse workspace directory.
<plugin>
<groupId>ch.elca.el4j.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-eclipse-server-plugin</artifactId>
<version>${version.maven-eclipse-server-plugin}</version>
<configuration>
<workspace>${eclipse.workspace}</workspace>
</configuration>
</plugin>
Per default, the path to the server runtime and configuration is taken from the corresponding settings inside your main settings.xml or pom.xml file (tomcat6x.home property). In this case, the path to the configuration directory will be $tomcat6x.home/conf. These two settings can be manually configured with the following configuration properties:
...
<configuration>
...
<tomcat6xhome>path/to/tomcat/homedirectory</tomcat6xhome>
<tomcat6xconf>path/to/tomcat/confdirectory</tomcat6xconf>
</configuration>
...
During the execution of the goal eclipseserver:tomcat6x, a new Project named Servers will be created inside your workspace. This project is needed by eclipse to access the configuration files given by the tomcat6x.home property or the tomcat6xhome plugin configuration entry. Therefore, the created project contains a linkedResource entry to the given configuration files named tomcat6x_conf_link.
To get the tomcat server running, you have to import the automatically created Servers project into your eclipse after the execution of the goal eclipseserver:tomcat6x. To achieve this, just go to File -> Import -> Existing Projects into Workspace. In the following dialog, browse to your workspace and select the project folder named Servers to be imported.
If you change the underlying settings for the plugin and re-execute the goal, you have to refresh the Servers project to make eclipse adapt the changed configuration.
For detailed usage see the plugin info page.