Tomcat in Intellij Idea Community Edition

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.

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>

Using Maven, try tomcat7-maven-plugin:

  <build>          <plugins>              <plugin>                  <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.maven</groupId>                  <artifactId>tomcat7-maven-plugin</artifactId>                  <version>2.2</version>                  <configuration>                      <path>/</path>                      <contextFile>src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/config/app-config.xml</contextFile>                      <mode>context</mode>                      <charset>UTF-8</charset>                      <warDirectory>target/${project.artifactId}-${project.version}</warDirectory>                  </configuration>              </plugin>          </plugins>  </build>

Run it using tomcat7:run-war

More goals here