Question

I have a war file with my webapp and I need to generate the database tables in MySQL in the moment when I have copied the war to the webapps folder from Tomcat (assuming Tomcat is running).

Is there a way to do this, can you help me with some information about this?

PS. It’s a very simple webapp, using just JDBC, i don’t use any ORM frameworks. Is it possible with JDBC?

Answer 1

Do the job in the contextInitialized() method of a custom ServletContextListener class. This will be invoked when the webapp starts up.

@WebListener
public class Config implements ServletContextListener {

    @Override
    public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent event) {
        // Just write/call JDBC code here the usual way to create database/tables if not exists.
    }

    // ...
}

That said, using an ORM framework like JPA/Hibernate really saves you from a lot of JDBC boilerplate code and headaches.