Spring Boot Maven plugin - How to deploy WAR to an external tomcat's webapp folder?

 Introduction

Spring Boot Maven plugin by default generates the WAR file inside the target folder. In this post, I will explain how to copy the generated war file to an external Tomcat's webapps folder using Spring Boot Maven plugin.

In my earliest post, you can learn how to package a Spring Boot application as WAR. 

Solution

Step 1 

Follow this link to specify the packaging as WAR in pom.xml and also to configure the SpringBootServletInitializer class

Step 2 (optional)

Specify a cleaner name for WAR using the finalName tag in pom.xml 

<finalName>auth</finalName>

Step 3

Specify the outputDirectory directory

    <build>
	<finalname>auth</finalname>
	<plugins>
		<plugin>
        <groupid>org.springframework.boot</groupid>
			<artifactid>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactid>
			<configuration>
	        <outputdirectory>D:/Development Utils/apache-tomcat-9.0.30/webapps</outputdirectory>
			</configuration>
		</plugin>
	</plugins>
    </build>
    

Conclusion