Step Zero: Install the System Tomcat Plugin, and configure your Eclipse preferences to point to an instance of Tomcat which has been configured with the DevLoader.zip classes. You can find instructions for this here .
Step One: Add the plugin to your web application's pom.xml . This will include the sysdeo-tomcat-plugin, which will produce a .tomcatplugin file if your application is of "war" packaging type. This will also automatically add the tomcat nature to your eclipse .project file to enable the Tomcat menu for this project in Eclipse:
<plugin>
<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
<artifactId>sysdeo-tomcat-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.1</version>
</plugin>
Step Two: After doing this, you should then take note of the .tomcatplugin file which should be generated when you run:
mvn sysdeo-tomcat:generate
You can run this plugin's generate goal at the top-level of a large multimodule project that contains projects of different packaging type. This plugin is configured to skip a project that does not have war packaging.
You can optionaly configure the eclipse.workspace property in your settings.xml to point to your eclipse workspace. This will allow the sysdeo-tomcat plugin to discover available projects in the workspace and use them as projects references (not as jars).