Tomcat in Intellij Idea Community Edition

Solution 1:

Intellij Community does not offer Java application server integration. Your alternatives are

1. buying Intellij licence,
2. switching to Eclipse ;)
3. installing Smart Tomcat plugin https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9492
4. installing IDEA Jetty Runner plugin https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7505
5. running the application server from Maven, Gradle, whatever, as outlined in the other answers.

I personally installed the Jetty Runner plugin (Jetty is fine for me, I do not need Tomcat) and I am satisfied with this solution. I had to deal with IntelliJ idea - Jetty, report an exception, though.

Solution 2:

If you are using maven, you can use this command mvn tomcat:run, but first you add in your pom.xml this structure into build tag, just like this:

<build>
    <finalName>mvn-webapp-test</finalName>
      <plugins>
          <plugin>
              <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
              <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
              <version>${maven.compiler.plugin.version}</version>
              <configuration>
                  <source>1.6</source>
                  <target>1.6</target>
              </configuration>
          </plugin>
      </plugins>
  </build>