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Deploying Mule as a Service to Tomcat

Mule runtime engine version 3.8 reached its End of Life on November 16, 2021. For more information, contact your Customer Success Manager to determine how to migrate to the latest Mule version.

This page describes two activities that let you deploy your Mule applications on a Tomcat Web server:

  • Install Mule as a service on an Apache Tomcat server

  • Set up your Mule applications for hot deployment

For more information on hot deploying Mule applications, see Application Server Based Hot Deployment.

Installing Mule on Tomcat

The following instructions have been verified for use with Mule 3.7.3 and newer:

  1. Download and install Apache Tomcat, following Apache’s installation instructions.

  2. In the Tomcat home directory on your system, add the following line to the conf/server.xml file:

    <Listener className="org.mule.module.tomcat.MuleTomcatListener" />

  3. Create a mule-libs subdirectory under the Tomcat home directory.

  4. Copy the contents of the Mule lib folder with all its subdirectories – except /boot to the mule-libs/ subdirectory of your Tomcat home directory. Do not flatten the directory structure.

  5. Copy the mule-module-tomcat-<version>.jar file to the mule-libs/mule/ directory in your Tomcat home directory.

  6. Copy the following libraries from your Mule lib/boot/ directory to your Tomcat `mule-libs/opt/`directory:

    • commons-cli-1.2.jar

    • disruptor-3.3.0.jar

    • jcl-over-slf4j-1.7.7.jar

    • log4j-api-2.1.jar

    • log4j-core-2.1.jar

    • log4j-jcl-2.1.jar

    • log4j-slf4j-impl-2.1.jar

    • slf4j-api-1.7.7.jar

    • wrapper-3.5.26.jar

  7. In the Tomcat conf/catalina.properties file, add the following to common.loader (preceded by a comma to separate it from existing values):

    ${catalina.base}/lib,${catalina.base}/lib/*.jar,${catalina.home}/lib,${catalina.home}/lib/*.jar,${catalina.home}/mule-libs/user/*.jar,${catalina.home}/mule-libs/mule/*.jar,${catalina.home}/mule-libs/opt/*.jar,${catalina.home}/mule-libs/endorsed/*.jar

    Ensure you have only one listener in your web.xml file:

    <listener>
<listener-class>
org.mule.module.tomcat.MuleTomcatListener
</listener-class>
</listener>

Deploying Mule Applications in Tomcat

  1. Package your Mule application’s configuration files and custom Java classes in a .war file (see Application Server Based Hot Deployment).

  2. In the Maven project, all Mule provided dependencies, that is, any library provided in the mule-libs directory, must have a <scope>provided</scope> definition to prevent classloading conflicts between duplicated libraries.

  3. Copy your application’s .war file, then paste it in the Tomcat /webapps directory.

  4. Tomcat hot deploys the application.

If you need to make a change to the configuration or Java file in the Mule application, modify the file in the expanded directory under the Tomcat /webapps directory, then touch the web.xml file (for example, simply add and delete a space in the file and then save it). These actions trigger Tomcat to redeploy the application.

Alternatively, you can modify the application’s source files, repackage them as a .war file, then drop the new .war file into the /webapps directory to trigger Tomcat to redeploy the application.

See Also

  • Learn about deploying Mule applications in the cloud with CloudHub.