spring boot war without tomcat embedded

I'm not sure if that's the spring-boot way of doing it, but you can exclude the tomcat jars using the maven-war-plugin configuration. That is, add the following to your pom.xml:

<build>
    <plugins>
        ...
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>2.4</version>
            <configuration>
                <packagingExcludes>WEB-INF/lib/tomcat-*.jar</packagingExcludes>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

Using this approach, the war generated is not executable (cannot be run on command line using java -jar ) but can only be deployed to any servlet container

Following the Hint from M. Deinum I excluded the tomcat-depedency.

With the following pom.xml (relevant snippet) a maven clean package has the result I want to get.

...
<parent>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
    <version>1.1.6.RELEASE</version>
</parent>
<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
        <exclusions>
            <exclusion>
                <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
                <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-tomcat</artifactId>
            </exclusion>
        </exclusions>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-thymeleaf</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <!-- Add tomcat only if I want to run directly -->
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-tomcat</artifactId>
        <scope>provided</scope>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>
<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>
...

Warning for idea-user: You must activate "Include dependencies with the provided scope" in the run-configuration (see Unable to start spring-boot application in IntelliJ Idea for more information)