Alternate port for Tomcat (not 8080) when starting with Maven?

I know this thread is old but…

The link to the documentation, provided by Greg is interesting :

port:
The port to run the Tomcat server on.
    Type: int
    Required: No
    Expression: ${maven.tomcat.port}
    Default: 8080

The expression is what maven use to get the value in its code. It could come from a configuration file, or from the command line.

You could run

mvn -Dmaven.tomcat.port=8181 tomcat:run-war

Using the syntax given on tomcat-maven-plugin, you can directly specify the port:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
  <artifactId>tomcat-maven-plugin</artifactId>            
  <configuration>          
    <server>tomcat-development-server</server>
    <port>9966</port>
  </configuration>
</plugin>