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RajarshiG
RajarshiG

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🚀 Deploying to Multiple Tomcat Instances on Windows with Jenkins — Batch Pitfalls & Service Fixes

🎯 Goal

To set up a local CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins, deploying a Spring Boot WAR to two separate Tomcat 11 instances (DEV and QA) on a Windows system.

😓 Initial Issues Faced

  1. Tomcat auto-shutdown after Jenkins build
  • Jenkins would invoke startup.bat, but as soon as the job finished, Tomcat shut down.
  • This was due to startup.bat running inside the Jenkins process and getting killed after.
  1. Port Conflicts
  • Both Tomcat instances used the same default ports (8080, 8005, 8009), which prevented them from running simultaneously.
  1. Environment variables not picked up by Spring Boot
  • I needed a way to inject environment-specific values (like env=DEV/QA) into Spring's @Value annotations.

🧠 Key Learnings & Fixes

✅ 1. Use Tomcat as a Windows Service

Instead of relying on startup.bat, I:

  • Installed TomcatDev and TomcatQA as Windows services: 
cd "C:\apache-tomcat-11.0.8-DEV\bin"
service.bat install TomcatDev

cd "C:\apache-tomcat-11.0.8-QA\bin"
service.bat install TomcatQA
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  • Used sc to control services from Jenkins: 
bat 'sc stop TomcatDev && timeout /t 5 >nul && sc start TomcatDev'
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This prevents Jenkins from terminating the server.

✅ 2. Customize server.xml for Each Instance

Modified these ports in conf/server.xml for both instances:

Port Type DEV QA
HTTP 8081 8082
Shutdown Port 8006 8007
AJP 8009 8010

Ensure they don't overlap, or services will fail silently or crash.

✅ 3. Set Environment-Specific Flags

  • Created a setenv.bat inside each bin/ folder: 
set JAVA_OPTS=-Denv=DEV
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Spring Boot picks this up with:

@Value("${env}")
private String environment;
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🔧 Jenkinsfile: Deploy to Tomcat Services

Here’s a simplified Jenkins pipeline excerpt:

stage('Deploy to DEV') {
    steps {
        bat """
        sc stop TomcatDev
        timeout /t 5 >nul
        copy target\\app.war "C:\\apache-tomcat-11.0.8-DEV\\webapps\\app.war"
        sc start TomcatDev
        """
    }
}
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Same pattern for QA.

💬 Final Thoughts

This debugging session taught me a lot about how Jenkins, Windows, and Tomcat interact.
If you're running Tomcat on Windows and see it die after Jenkins runs, it's probably due to how you're starting it. Using services + sc is the safest and most robust way.

🔗 LinkedIn Recap Post

If you're short on time, I shared a quick summary of this battle on LinkedIn:
👉 https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajarshig007/post

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