I find Tomcat's Manager App's text interface very useful when ssh'ing into a headless Tomcat server. I created this little shell client so I don't have to remember the raw URL API.
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Walkthrough
Here is a little example session to demonstrate what tomcat-manager looks like.
$ tomcat-manager help
USAGE:
tomcat-manager
tomcat-manager COMMAND [OPTIONS ...]
COMMANDS:
---
list
List the context paths of all currently installed web applications.
start CONTEXT_PATH ...
Start the web application attached to CONTEXT_PATH.
stop CONTEXT_PATH ...
Stop the web application attached to CONTEXT_PATH.
reload CONTEXT_PATH ...
Reload the Java classes and resources for the web application attached to
CONTEXT_PATH. This is not equivalent to a stop followed by a start.
deploy WARFILE [CONTEXT_PATH]
Install and start a new web application attached to CONTEXT_PATH, based on the
contents of the web application archive found at the specified path WARFILE.
If CONTEXT_PATH is not specified then it is constructed from WARFILE, e.g.
WARFILE=/tmp/webapp.war -> CONTEXT_PATH=/webapp
undeploy CONTEXT_PATH ...
Shutdown and remove the web application attached to CONTEXT_PATH, and remove
the underlying WAR file or document base directory.
resources
Enumerate the available global JNDI resources.
serverinfo
Display system OS and JVM properties.
expire CONTEXT_PATH [IDLE]
List session idle timeinformation about the web application attached to context
path CONTEXT_PATH. If IDLE is specified, expire sessions for the CONTEXT_PATH
which were idle for at least IDLE minutes.
---
startup
Start Catalina.
debug
Start Catalina under JPDA debugger.
shutdown
Stop Catalina, waiting up to 5 seconds for the process to end.
kill [-SIGNAL]
Kill Catalina with 'kill -TERM' or if -SIGNAL is specified .e.g. 'kill -9'
version
What version of tomcat are you running?
---
help
Print this help.
When tomcat-manager is called without arguments it will start in an interactive subshell. This saves a little typing because all the commands are directly available and also has the advantage of context-path tab completion.
$ tomcat-manager Type 'help' to show list of commands. tomcat-manager>
Let's show the list of currently deployed webapps.
tomcat-manager> list context_path status sessions docbase ------------ ------- -------- ------- / running 0 ROOT /examples running 0 examples /host-manager running 0 host-manager /manager running 0 manager /docs running 0 docs
If we stop two webapps and deploy a new one...
tomcat-manager> stop /examples /docs OK - Stopped application at context path /examples OK - Stopped application at context path /docs tomcat-manager> deploy /tmp/demonstration.war OK - Deployed application at context path /demonstration
...the list now looks like this:
tomcat-manager> list context_path status sessions docbase ------------ ------- -------- ------- / running 0 ROOT /examples stopped 0 examples /host-manager running 0 host-manager /demonstration running 0 demonstration /manager running 0 manager /docs stopped 0 docs