Docker add warfile to official Tomcat image - docker

Question

I pulled official Docker image for Tomcat by running this command.
docker run -it --rm tomcat:8.0
By using this as base image I need to build new image that contains my war file in the tomcat webapps folder. I created Dockerfile like this.
From tomcat8
ADD warfile /usr/local/tomcat
When I run this Dockerfile by building image I am not able to see Tomcat front page.
Can anybody tell me how to add my warfile to official Tomcat images webapp folder.

Answer 1

Reading from the documentation of the repo you would do something like that
FROM tomcat
MAINTAINER xyz
ADD your.war /usr/local/tomcat/webapps/
CMD ["catalina.sh", "run"]
Then build your image with docker build -t yourName <path-to-dockerfile>
And run it with:
docker run --rm -it -p 8080:8080 yourName
--rm removes the container as soon as you stop it
-p forwards the port to your host (or if you use boot2docker to this IP)
-it allows interactive mode, so you see if something get's deployed

Answer 2

Building on #daniel's answer, if you want to deploy your WAR to the root of tomcat, I did this:
FROM tomcat:7-jre7
MAINTAINER xyz
RUN ["rm", "-fr", "/usr/local/tomcat/webapps/ROOT"]
COPY ./target/your-webapp-1.0-SNAPSHOT.war /usr/local/tomcat/webapps/ROOT.war
CMD ["catalina.sh", "run"]
It deletes the existing root webapp, copies your WAR to the ROOT.war filename then executes tomcat.

Answer 3

docker run -it --rm --name MYTOMCAT -p 8080:8080 -v .../wars:/usr/local/tomcat/webapps/ tomcat:8.0
where wars folder contains war to deploy

Answer 4

How do you check the webapps folder?
The webapps folder is within the docker container.
If you want to access your webapps container you could mount a host directory within your container to use it as webapps folder. That way you can access files without accessing docker.
Details see here
To access your logs you could do that when you run your container e.g.
docker run -rm -it -p 8080:8080 **IMAGE_NAME** /path/to/tomcat/bin/catalina.sh && tail -f /path/to/tomcat/logs
or you start your docker container and then do something like:
docker exec -it **CONTAINER_ID** tail -f /path/to/tomcat/logs

Answer 5

If you are using spring mvc project then you require server to run your application suppose you use tomcat then you need base image of tomcat that your application uses which you can specify through FROM command.
You can set environment variable using ENV command.
You can additionally use RUN command which executes during Docker Image buiding.
eg to give read write execute permissions to webapps folder for tomcat to unzip war file
RUN chmod -R 777 $CATALINA_HOME/webapps
And one more command is CMD. Whatever you specifying in CMD command it will execute at a time of container running. You can specify options in CMD command using double quotes(" ") seperated by comma(,).
eg
CMD ["catalina.sh","start"]
(NOTE : Remember RUN command execute at a time of image building and CMD execute at a time of running container this is confusing for new users).
This is my Dockerfile -
FROM tomcat:9.0.27-jdk8-openjdk
VOLUME /tmp
RUN chmod -R 777 $CATALINA_HOME/webapps
ENV CATALINA_HOME /usr/local/tomcat
COPY target/*.war $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/myapp.war
EXPOSE 8080
CMD ["catalina.sh","run"]
Build your image using command
docker build -t imageName <path_of_Dockerfile>
check your docker image using command
docker images
Run image using command
docker run -p 9999:8080 imageName
here 8080 is tomcat port and application can access on 9999 port
Try accessing your application on
localhost:9999/myapp/