Is it possible to supply Tomcat6's context.xml file via the Maven Cargo plugin?

Eureka! After many days of studying this problem I finally found a very effective solution. The key is to take your Tomcat XML context fragment file and use the <configfiles> element of cargo to drop it in the conf/Catalina/localhost directory with the name context.xml.default. The only downside is that this will make your context definitions available to all web-apps, but this shouldn't really matter only Cargo is using this Tomcat instance thus there is no other web-app.

Here's the configuration:

<configuration> <!-- Deployer configuration -->
    <type>standalone</type>
    <properties>
       <cargo.servlet.port>${tomcat6.port}</cargo.servlet.port>
    </properties>
    <deployables>
      <deployable>
        <groupId>com.myapp<groupId>
        <artifactId>myapp-war</artifactId>
        <type>war</type>
        <properties>
               <context>${tomcat6.context}</context>
        </properties>
       </deployable>
     </deployables>
    <configfiles>
       <configfile>
         <file>${basedir}/../config/tomcat-context.xml</file>
         <todir>conf/Catalina/localhost/</todir>
         <tofile>context.xml.default</tofile>
       </configfile>
    </configfiles>
</configuration>

The net result is no more bogus WAR modules for testing only, and no more merging of WARs. Hope this helps somebody.

According https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-9.0-doc/config/context.html#Defining_a_context and https://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-9.0-doc/config/context.html#Naming Tomcat 9 allows making individual application context.xml (checked).

        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.codehaus.cargo</groupId>
            <artifactId>cargo-maven2-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>1.7.10</version>
            <configuration>
                <container>
                    <containerId>tomcat9x</containerId>
                    <systemProperties>
                        <file.encoding>UTF-8</file.encoding>
                        <spring.profiles.active>tomcat,datajpa</spring.profiles.active>
                    </systemProperties>
                    <dependencies>
                        <dependency>
                            <groupId>org.postgresql</groupId>
                            <artifactId>postgresql</artifactId>
                        </dependency>
                    </dependencies>
                </container>
                <configuration>
                    <configfiles>
                        <configfile>
                            <file>src/main/resources/tomcat/context.xml</file>
                            <todir>conf/Catalina/localhost/</todir>
                            <tofile>${project.build.finalName}.xml</tofile>
                        </configfile>
                    </configfiles>
                </configuration>
                <deployables>
                    <deployable>
                        <groupId>ru.javawebinar</groupId>
                        <artifactId>topjava</artifactId>
                        <type>war</type>
                        <properties>
                            <context>${project.build.finalName}</context>
                        </properties>
                    </deployable>
                </deployables>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>

I haven't found a way to do this yet, but I have come up with a work around that works in my project. I currently have a project with essentially 3 submodules:

    dependencies
    webapp
    smoketest

When I'm building the "webapp" project, I execute the following plugin declaration:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
    <executions>
        <execution>
        <id>create-war-smoketest</id>
        <phase>verify</phase>
        <goals>
            <goal>war</goal>
        </goals>
        <configuration>
            <webappDirectory>${project.build.directory}/exploded</webappDirectory>
            <primaryArtifact>false</primaryArtifact>
            <classifier>smoketest</classifier>
            <webResources>
            <resource>
                <filtering>true</filtering>
                <directory>src/test/resources/smoketest</directory>
                <targetPath>META-INF</targetPath>
                <includes>
                    <include>context.xml</include>
                </includes>
            </resource>
            </webResources>
        </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

And then when I'm running my Cargo/WebTest suite in the SmokeTest project, I specify the smoketest WAR file as a dependency and in my Cargo configuration set my deployrables thusly:

<deployables>
    <deployable>
        <groupId>${pom.groupId}</groupId>
        <artifactId>webapp</artifactId>
        <type>war</type>
        <properties>
            <context>smoketest</context>
        </properties>
    </deployable>
</deployables>

With the dependency looking something like:

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>${pom.groupId}</groupId>
        <artifactId>webapp</artifactId>
        <version>${pom.version}</version>
        <classifier>smoketest</classifier>
        <type>war</type>
        <scope>system</scope>
        <!-- trick the dependency plugin to never look for it in the repo -->
        <systemPath>${basedir}/../webapp/target/webapp-${pom.version}-smoketest.war</systemPath>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

It's extremely dirty, but it at least works... for now. One quick note: my comment about forcing it to never look for a version in the repo is possibly incorrect at this point; I think this trick may have been broken by a change to the dependency plugin at some point.