How to use Tomcat 8 in Eclipse?

Question

EDIT 2014-02-07: Eclipse Luna is here, and support for Tomcat 8 is included in the bundled WTP : ) Happy days!

Tomcat 8 is still in development, but you can get it here. Now there is a RC version on the main Apache Tomcat page. Update 2/27/14: 8 is released now, and adapters built for WTP, just not integrated into eclipse bundles yet. Soon!

In Eclipse Kepler though, there is no supported adapter in the add server list for Tomcat 8. the Tomcat 7 adapter doesn't work, and it doesn't look like there's a new extension for it to download in the "Install new Extension" dialog.

Is my only option to get it (Tomcat 8) running locally outside of Eclipse and maybe hook a remote debugger into it for stepping through code? Will that even work for Eclipse Kepler + Tomcat 8? IntelliJ IDEA 12 couldn't do it in the 30 minutes of time I put into that path.

If you're wondering why I'm trying to do this at all, I'm playing around with Spring 4.0.0.M1 and 4.0.0.M2 WebSocket stuff. They (per Rossen Stoyanchev's Spring 4.0 blog post and examples) use JSR-356, which is implemented in Tomcat 8, theoretically to be back-ported at some point to Tomcat 7.

An answer to the broader question of "How can I easily get a development environment going for Spring 4 WebSocket support?" would be nice, but it would also still be nice to know how to plug in unsupported web servers to Eclipse.

Cheers, E

**Update 8/7/13 - Rossen Stoyanchev updated the Spring 4.0.0.M2 blog and added some jpda wisdom and shared that yeah, he's using remote debugging:

That said, it's not very hard to debug with Tomcat 8 inside Eclipse. Just change the last line in bin/startup.sh to be (note the addition of "jpda"):

 exec "$PRGDIR"/"$EXECUTABLE" jpda start "$@"

Inside Eclipse create a remote debugging configuration for localhost port 80, launch it after starting Tomcat, and you can put breakpoints in the source code.

Thanks Rossen!

**Update 9/29/13 - Eclipse Kepler SR1 just arrived, but alas! No WTP support for Tomcat 8. Tomcat 8 is up to RC3.

**Updates 12/5/13

• Blog url fix.
• Tomcat 8 up to RC5.
• Bug to track WTP fix in Eclipse to support Tomcat 8 HERE.
• IntelliJ IDEA new version 13 says it now supports Tomcat 8. Haven't tried yet personally.

Answer 1

In addition to @Jason's answer I had to do a bit more to get my app to run.

• Download & unzip Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers (Note the EE edition)
• Download & unzip Eclipse's Web Tools Platform Stable (Milestone) 3.6+
• Overwrite the two folders in the Eclipse IDE, with the WTP folder(s) (features & plugins folders)
• Download and unzip Tomcat 8
• In eclipse new -> other -> server -> Tomcat 8 (choose the unzipped location)
• If you get a 404, click the Tomcat 8 in the Servers view -> Server Locations -> Change to Use Tomcat installation, and change the Deploy path: to webapps * (If you can't edit this, delete any published webapps)

Answer 2

I follow Jason's step, but not works.

And then I find the WTP Update site http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/updates/.

Help -> Install new software -> Add > WTP:http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/updates/ -> OK

Then Help -> Check for update, just works, I don't know whether Jason's affect this .

Answer 3

Alternatively we can use eclipse update site (Help -> Install New Features -> Add Site (urls below) -> Select desired Features).

For Luna: http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/repository/luna

For Kepler: http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/repository/kepler

For Helios: http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/repository/helios

For older version: http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/updates/

Answer 4

Downloaded Eclipse Luna and installed WTP using http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/repository/luna

Downloaded Tomcat 8 and configured new server in Eclipse. I am able to setup tomcat 8 now in Eclipse luna

Answer 5

If you have untarred your own version of tomcat v8 with a root user into a custom directory (linux) then the default permissions on the TOMCATROOT/lib directory do not allow normal user access.

Eclipse will not be able to see the catalina.jar to check the version. So no amount of fiddling aorund with the server.properties will help!

just add chmod u+x lib/ to allow normal user access to the libs.

Answer 6

To add the Tomcat 9.0 (Tomcat build from the trunk) as a server in Eclipse.

Update the ServerInfo.properties file properties as below.

server.info=Apache Tomcat/@VERSION@
server.number=@VERSION_NUMBER@
server.built=@VERSION_BUILT@


server.info=Apache Tomcat/7.0.57
server.number=7.0.57.0
server.built=Nov 3 2014 08:39:16 UTC

Build the tomcat server from trunk and add the server as tomcat7 instance in Eclipse.

ServerInfo.properties file location : \tomcat\java\org\apache\catalina\util\ServerInfo.properties