Eclipse Maven Debug on Server problem

I created a maven web-app project and then load it up into SpringSource Tool Suite 2.7.1 (which has m2eclipse core and extra installed).

When I do "Run on Server", the extra build steps in the pom.xml are not executed, and I ended up deploying a basic web-app (index.jsp along with WEBINF folder)

I have to build (Maven package) and deploy it manually (copy and paste into Tomcat) so I got the whole lot.

Is there anyway I can instruct m2eclipse/STS to process my pom.xml before "Run on Server" ?

Edit

I have开发者_StackOverflow maven-war-plugin, which unzips some zip files etc, this doesn't get executed when I choose "Run on Server"

Which steps in particular are not getting executed?

The first check that I would suggest is to see if the project is correctly configured.

You must ensure that the executions are correctly defined to be run on the desired phases.

The answer is: Eclipse + Maven + Tomcat: testing web apps when the WAR is built with custom options

Essentially I can use "Deployment Assembly" to deploy things