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I ran into a problem today: When using the command mvn tomcat:run (the maven tomcat plugin) to quickly run a Tomcat instance and edit some JSPs on the fly I noticed my application was unable to find it’s JNDI defined DataSource:

javax.naming.NameNotFoundException: Name jdbc is not bound in this Context

But this DataSource is defined in the src/main/webapp/META-INF/context.xml default context file:

<Context>
        <Resource name="jdbc/dbname" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource"
                maxActive="100" maxIdle="30" maxWait="10000"
                username="username" password="pass" driverClassName="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
                url="jdbc:mysql://localhost/dbname?autoReconnect=true"/>
</Context>

So I searched the web for other people with these kind of issues and found a few mailinglist questions (all unanswered) here and here. And finally found out that it is just not possible to use a context.xml with the tomcat:run goal as it is still an open issue in the codehaus JIRA: #MOJO-594. So I hope this might save someone some time searching for how to get tomcat to pickup the context.