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This section of the FAQ discusses common questions related to Tomcat development.

Questions

1. Hacking
   1. How do I start hacking Tomcat in Eclipse?
2. Debugging
   1. How do I configure Tomcat to support remote debugging?
   2. How do I remotely debug Tomcat using Eclipse?
   3. How do I remotely debug Tomcat using NetBeans?
3. Other
   1. How do I change the monitoring interval for modified resources and application reloading?

Answers

Hacking

How do I start hacking Tomcat in Eclipse?

Briefly:

$ svn checkout http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/tomcat/trunk
  (or whatever branch you want: clearly, this would be better
  to do directly from within Eclipse but it's easier to describe
  as a command)

$ cd trunk

$ echo "base.path=/path/to/where/tomcat/can/put/its/3rd-party/libs" > build.properties

$ ant ide-eclipse

Then, in Eclipse, go to Preferences | Java/Build Path/Classpath Variables and set the following variables:

ANT_HOME=path to your Ant install (where lib/ant.jar can be found)
TOMCAT_LIBS_BASE=[whatever you set base.path to above]

If you look in (project root)/res/ide-support/eclipse/java-compiler-errors-warnings.txt, you'll see a set of compiler warnings and import organization rules that you will have to set up manually in your project. If you set those up properly, you are more likely to submit cleaner patches.

Debugging

How do I configure Tomcat to support remote debugging?

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