deploy spring boot websocket sample application to tomcat7

Question

Following tutorial helped me to get a spring boot application up and running real fast: https://spring.io/guides/gs/messaging-stomp-websocket/

But now I'm stuck trying to generate a war file and deploying it on my tomcat7 application server.

I followed the [instructions][1] to create a deployable war file, but this just isn't working. I don't see any errors in the logs, but I don't see my nice sample application either when I browse to http://localhost:8080.

Here are the steps I took to generate a war file:

1) Modify pom.xml by changing the packaging to war and marking the spring-boot-starter-websocket as provided

<packaging>war</packaging>
<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-websocket</artifactId>
        <scope>provided</scope>            
    </dependency>            
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-messaging</artifactId>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

2) Modify Application.java to override the SpringBootServletInitializer configure method.

@SpringBootApplication
public class Application extends SpringBootServletInitializer {

    @Override
    protected SpringApplicationBuilder configure(SpringApplicationBuilder application) {
        return application.sources(Application.class);
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
    }
}

3) Then I run

mvn clean package

and deploy the generated war-file, but I just keep getting the default Tomcat welcome page, when I browse to http://localhost:8080/.

I also tried changing the application contextPath by adding the following application.properties:

server.contextPath=/websocketclient
server.port=8082

But this doesn't solve the problem.

Answer 1

I get it working, I am using Tomcat 8.

Take a look at my code here: https://github.com/pauldeng/gs-messaging-stomp-websocket

Read and edit the pom file accordingly and run mvn package to create the package specified.

Answer 2

I made a mistake in my pom.xml, the provided scope shouldn't be added to the spring-boot-starter-websocket artefact. But you should add the spring-boot-starter-tomcat artefact with the provided scope.

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-websocket</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-tomcat</artifactId>
        <scope>provided</scope>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-messaging</artifactId>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

I also had to modify my javascript to contact the websocket, which is now under /gs-messaging-stomp-websocket-0.1.0

var socket = new SockJS('/gs-messaging-stomp-websocket-0.1.0/hello');

Answer 3

The deployed application war needs to be called ROOT.war otherwise you will have to configure server.xml.

Second you should turn on the NIO connector for websockets see server.xml and http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/web-socket-howto.html