The tomcat maven plugin comes with handy exec-war-only goal that will bundle a standalone tomcat server in an executable jar. Add following configuration to your pom file:

  org.apache.tomcat.maven
  tomcat7-maven-plugin
  2.0
  
    
      tomcat-run
      
        exec-war-only
      
      package
      
        /
      
    
  

And when you run the package goal, another artifact called myapp-x.y-war-exec.jar will be created. To run this simply execute java -jar myapp-x.y-war-exec.jar on a terminal shell.

The jar also comes with several options of which you can view by giving –help flag. The -httpPort is often useful to setup few testing environments:

C:\myapp>java -jar myapp-1.0-war-exec.jar --help
usage: java -jar [path to your exec war jar]
 -ajpPort                      ajp port to use
 -clientAuth                            enable client authentication for
                                        https
 -D                                key=value
 -extractDirectory    path to extract war content,
                                        default value: .extract
 -h,--help                              help
 -httpPort                    http port to use
 -httpProtocol            http protocol to use: HTTP/1.1 or
                                        org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Nio
                                        Protocol
 -httpsPort                  https port to use
 -keyAlias                    alias from keystore for ssl
 -loggerName                logger to use: slf4j to use slf4j
                                        bridge on top of jul
 -obfuscate                   obfuscate the password and exit
 -resetExtract                          clean previous extract directory
 -serverXmlPath          server.xml to use, optional
 -uriEncoding              connector uriEncoding default
                                        ISO-8859-1
 -X,--debug                             debug