Remote deploy Tomcat webapp from Eclipse

For development and testing purposes I'd like to deploy my webapp from within eclipse to a remote tomcat ser开发者_运维知识库ver. Is this possible ? If not, how should I set up my development environment for smooth and easy remote deployment ?

If you can access the Tomcat manager application remotely then you can use the Tomcat Ant tasks or Tomcat Maven plugin to handle this. Both of these can then be called from within Eclipse.

Using either Ant or Maven also gives you the advantage of being able to deploy from outside of Eclipse. In my experience separating deployment from the IDE is helpful (our sysadmins don't run Eclipse!).

My personal choice is Maven, but Ant is equally capable in this area. I also use Maven profiles to let me easily switch between local/remote deployment (different server, passwords, etc).

For development and testing purposes I'd like to deploy my webapp from within eclipse to a remote tomcat server. Is this possible ?

The Tomcat support in WTP only works with a local Tomcat. That said, there is a tomcat deployer plugin that can be used to deploy to a remote tomcat (never tested personally).

If not, how should I set up my development environment for smooth and easy remote deployment ?

If you don't like the plugin, then you could use build tools like Ant or Maven, they have good support for remote deployment trough the manager application as pointed out by Chris. I'd just add Cargo to the list (Tomcat remote deployment is only available with the Maven 2 plugin though).

Actually, using a build tool would be a good idea regardless of Eclipse capabilities in my opinion.

You can use the Ant FTP task or SCP task for this. You can find examples here.