How to run Ant targets with Maven?

The maven-antrun-plugin allows us to run ant targets with various maven build phases. I am going to explain very practical usage of maven-antrun-plugin specially for developers with development environment.

Normally with maven build, you will bundle your project either to a war file or ear file. You can directly copy this war or ear file into the server deployment folder by using maven-antrun-plugin. If your sever is tomcat, you can directly copy your archive file to 'webapps' folder easily.  Some developers are used to copy the archive file to the server deployment folder manually even with their development. For them, this post will be very helpful.

If you want to use maven-antrun-plugin to copy your archive file into the server deployment folder every time when you build the project, you can add the following plugin into your pom.xml file and use what ever the ant targets as you wish.

Which pom.xml file, I am going to put this plugin to?

That is a good question. If you have multi module project, you should probably have either ear module or war module. Select the pom.xml file of that module and place the following plugin there. When you buld that project module, most of the time, it will be the last module bulding when you build your project in root level, maven will create either war file or ear file inside the target directory of your project module. We can configure maven-antrun-plugin so that it will copy that war file or ear file into server deployment folder.

In my case, I have multi module project and one module is a web module. I should place the the maven-antrun-plugin into web module's pom.xml file.

<build>
    <finalName>shims-web</finalName>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>1.7</version>
            <executions>
                <execution>
                    <phase>install</phase>
                    <configuration>
                          <target>
                              <copy file="${project.build.directory}/shims-web.war" todir="${env.CATALINA_HOME}/webapps"/>
                          </target>
                    </configuration>
                    <goals>
                         <goal>run</goal>
                    </goals>
                </execution>
            </executions>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

If you inspect the above snip of pom.xml file, I have given 'install' as the phase of execution. It simply says that "execute this ant target just after the install life cycle phase" of the maven build. With the execution of 'install' , maven will the package the whole project into the local repository as a war file or ear file, for use as a dependency in other projects locally. Also this will create the same file in the target directory of your workspace as well.

Our target is to copy that file from target director to server deployment folder with the build. The  ${env.CATALINA_HOME} will refer to the our tomcat installation directory.

Now build the your project or project module. You can navigate to your project directory or project module directory where our modified pom.xml is. Run the following command.

$mvn clean install

The above command will traverse into all of the sub projects and run clean, then install (including all of the prior steps). You can run that command in root project level which build the entire project, or you can run it for specific project module, which build only that project.

.......................
[INFO] --- maven-antrun-plugin:1.7:run (default) @ shims-web ---
[INFO] Executing tasks
main:
         [copy] Copying 1 file to /home/vinesh/apache-tomcat-7.0.25/webapps
[INFO] Executed tasks
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS ........................

If you are using m2eclipse to build your project, sometime, you may encounter strange scenario as follows. We hope maven will copy our archive file to the deployment folder of the server with the build completion. But sometime, maven will copy our archive file into the project workspace folder itself by creating the directories structure which we have mentioned as the destination directory in our pom.xml file of our ant copy target.

For example, in this case, it will create following directory structure in our local workspace folder rather than copying the file into the server folder. Just have a look on following image.

We are not expecting this scenario.

How can we overcome this?

You have to edit maven build target in eclipse by specifying the CATALINA_HOME environment variable. 

You can do this as follows.

Open "Run Configurations" window in eclipse and expand "Maven Build" category. You can see all the maven targets, you have created so far, have been listed there. Select the maven target which build your project with "clean install" goal.

And then open "Environment" tab. There you can add new variable for the CATALINA_HOME environmental variable as follows.

Click on 'Apply' button and then run your maven target again. Look into your eclipse console carefully. You can see that maven is copying your archive file into server deployment folder.

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• How to create multi module project with maven.

How to create multi module project with maven?

It is more than three years, I have started to use maven and it is a great tool, I have ever used. The support of repository management and the features available to create multi module project are excellent. With this tutorial, I am going to show you, how to create a multi module project with maven. I am using eclipse as IDE and 'm2eclipse' plugin for eclipse.

The following picture shows the project structure in eclipse.

My project is 'shims' and it has two modules as 'shims-core' and 'shims-web'. One module contains all business logic classes and data access objects which is bundled as jar file. And the other module is the web module which contains controller related classes (Struts2 action or Servlets or Spring controller classes) and view related stuff.

The tutorial summary is as follows.

• Installing maven
• Configure m2eclipse, maven with eclipse
• Creating parent project
• Creating child jar module
• Creating child war module
• Building multi module project

Installing maven

Download the Apache maven distribution and extract it some where in your computer. You can download the apache maven from here. I have extracted the distribution into the following location in my computer.

/home/vinesh/apache-maven-3.0.4

Next, You have to set 'MAVEN_HOME' environmental variable and add the path of maven's bin folder to classpath. In Ubuntu, you can set the variable as follows. You have to add the following two lines into bashrc file. First, run the following command to open 'bashrc' file.

$ vi ~/.bashrc

And add the following two lines.

export MAVEN_HOME=/home/vinesh/apache-maven-3.0.4
export PATH=$MAVEN_HOME/bin:$PATH

In windows, setting an environment variable is not that much difficult. So I am not going to explain that in this tutorial.

After editing 'bashrc' file, just open a command window and run the following command.

$ mvn -version

If you get the output similar to following, you are successfully configured apache maven.

Apache Maven 3.0.4 (r1232337; 2012-01-17 14:14:56+0530)
Maven home: /home/semika/apache-maven-3.0.4
Java version: 1.6.0_30, vendor: Sun Microsystems Inc.
Java home: /home/semika/java/jdk1.6.0_30/jre
Default locale: en_US, platform encoding: UTF-8
OS name: "linux", version: "2.6.38-16-generic", arch: "amd64", family: "unix"

You are done with the first step and let's move to next step.  

Configure m2eclipse, maven with eclipse 

You have to install m2eclipse plugin first. You can install m2eclipse plugin via eclipse it self. I am using eclipse 'Indigo' version and there may be slight differences with other version of eclipse. 

This is the update URL for m2eclipse.

http://download.eclipse.org/technology/m2e/releases

Go to Help --> Install New Software. You will get the following window.

You can add the above update URL and continue the wizard. Normally this will take some time and after finishing the installation, you have to restart the eclipse. Go to Window -->Preferences. You should see that 'Maven' category has added to preferences categories.

We are not going to use embedded maven coming with the plugin as I have highlighted in the above image. Instead, we are going to configure our maven installation with eclipse. 

Click the 'Add' button and locate your maven installation directory. For further clarification see the image bellow. 

You can see now, the plugin has been configured with our maven installation. Now, you are ready to create projects using m2eclipse. Let's start to create our multi module project.

Eclipse provides great facilities to create multi module projects and relationships among the modules. In this tutorial, I am going to create a maven multi module projects from the scratch.




 

Creating maven parent project

Step01: Go to File --> New --> Project.

You will get 'New Project' window. Under 'Maven' category, select 'Maven Project'. Click 'Next' button. You will get 'New Maven Project' window. See the bellow image.

Step 02: We are going to create simple maven project. As I have pointed out from right side image, make sure to check 'Create a simple project' checkbox. Click on 'Next' button. Then you will get the following window.

I feel, it is better to give little explanation about the four fields highlighted with red color box in the right side image.

Group Id: This is the root packaging structure of your project. Make sure to use the same root package structure for every module in the project. 

Artifact Id : This is similar to your project module name. In right side image, I have given 'shims' as the artifact id. That is the parent project of my all project modules.

Packaging: This is very important when creating multi module project with maven. There are several options which you can select as the packaging. If you want to create a parent project, we are doing like now, you have to select 'pom' as the packaging. To create Java module, select 'jar' and for web module, select 'war'. I will explain later on this tutorial, how to create a 'jar' and 'war' module. You know that 'shims-core' is a jar module which contains all the business logic and data access objects and 'shims-web' is a web module containing all controller  and view related stuff.

Click the 'Finish' button and see, maven is creating the parent project for our multi module project. Let's little examine this.

Open the 'pom.xml' file. It should be similar to the following.

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
  <groupId>com.semika</groupId>
  <artifactId>shims</artifactId>
  <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
  <packaging>pom</packaging>
</project>

Let's create our first child module.  

Creating maven child jar module

We want to keep our all business logic and DAO classes as a separate module which can be bundled to as a 'jar' file. We can create a separate project module for this purpose. In my sample application, it has 'shims-core' module. This is a child module of our parent project which we already created. 

To create child jar module.

Step 01: Right click on the parent project, Go to New-->Project. Select the 'Maven Module' from the 'Maven' category. As you can remember, we selected 'Maven Project' when we create our parent project before. Since we are creating a project module now, we should select 'Maven Module'. 

Click the 'Next' button. You will get 'New Maven Module' window as follows.

Make sure to check 'Create a simple project' check box and give a module name. You can see that 'shims' which is our parent project has automatically selected as the 'Parent Project'. We are in a correct way. Click the 'Next' button. You will get familiar window as follows.

As You can see in the right side image, 'Group Id', 'Artifact Id' and 'Version' have already been set by default. We don't need to change any of those three field values. Keep those values as it is. Since we are creating 'jar' module, we should select 'jar' as the packaging. Click the 'Finish' button and see maven is creating our first child module.

Now refresh the parent project and notice that maven has created a new project 'shims-core' inside the 'shims'. The 'shims-core' represents a another maven project module which has separate pom.xml file. Also 'shims-core' represents as the new project within eclipse.

Just have a look on following image.

Now, If you see parent project's pom.xml file, you can see that 'shims-core' has listed under modules which says that 'shims-core' is a child module of 'shims' parent project.

  <modules>
   <module>shims-core</module>
  </modules>

Also, in the child project's pom.xml file, it has a reference to parent project. Further, in child module's pom.xml file, 'groupId' and 'version' have not been defined. Those are inherited from parents project. This is good practice when you are creating multi module project with maven.

  <parent>
    <artifactId>shims</artifactId>
    <groupId>com.semika</groupId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <relativePath>..</relativePath>
  </parent>

Creating child war module

Next, we will create our web module, 'shims-web' which contains our controller classes and other view related stuff. Creating war module with m2eclipse is little different rather creating jar module. We have to use one of the maven pre-defined archetype  for web module creation. Don't worry, I will give you step by step explanation about creating maven war module. 

Step 01: Right click on parent project, Go to New-->Project and select 'Maven Module', Click 'Next' button.

In this case, we are not going to create a simple project. So don't check on 'Create simple project' check box. As you can see from the right side image, parent project has automatically selected as 'shims' which is our parent project. You have to specify the module name as 'shims-web'. and click 'Next' button.




Step 02: Click the 'Next' button from the above image. We are going to use 'maven-archetype-webapp' artifact to create our war module. See the bellow image.

Step 03: Click 'Next'  button from above window and you will get the following window.

You only need to change the 'Package' from right side window. Click the 'Finish' button and let the maven create our web module. After creating the new web module, refresh the parent project and notice that it has a new module as 'shims-web'. So now we have a multi module project with tow modules. Open pom.xml file from the web module and make sure to remove 'groupId' and 'version'. Also see the parent project's pom.xml file and notice that 'shims-web' has been added to it as a new module.

We hope to deploy our application as a war bundle into the server. If you want to change you war file name, you can change 'filaName' attribute of pom.xml file of 'shims-web' module.

  <build>
    <finalName>shims-web</finalName>
  </build>

This will create 'shims-web.war' file under 'target' directory of 'shims-web' module. Next, we need to define dependencies between 'shims-core' and 'shims-web' module. This will force the maven reactor to build 'shims-core' module before building 'shims-web' module when we run maven build from the parent project. Because, we want to bundle our business logic and DAO related classes into a separate jar module and give it to web module as a separate library along with other libraries, core module should be build before web module.

Place the following contents inside the 'dependencies' section of pom.xml file of 'shims-web' module.

    <dependency>
        <groupId>${project.groupId}</groupId>
        <artifactId>shims-core</artifactId>
        <version>${project.version}</version>
    </dependency>

${project.groupId} and ${project.version} are two global references of maven which provides 'groupId' and 'version' across the whole modules of the multi module project. We can directly use it.

Building multi module project

There are lots of advantages of creating multi module project. We can build the entire project at once and also we can build each module separately. Developers can separately work on different modules at the same time without depending on others. Other thing is, we have clear separation which enhance maintainability.

We have to create maven targets to build our project. Right click on parent project. Go to Run As --> Maven Build. You will get the following window only for the very first time. There you can create a new target to build your project. 

The right side window allow you to create maven target to build your project. You have to give a name for your build target and browse the required project module directory. Since I am going to create this maven target to build the entire project, I have located my parent directory. Put 'clean install' into the Goals field.

Since, we are going to build our project very first time, we should allow maven to download the required dependencies from their global repository. Make sure 'offline' check box 'unchecked'. After first success build, you can update this target to run it in offline mode by selecting 'offline' check box.

Make sure 'Maven Runtime' has been set to our maven installation directory. Otherwise you will get build errors.

OK!. That's it. You are ready to build your first maven multi module project. Good luck!

Click on 'Apply' and then 'Run' button. Maven will start the building project. See carefully eclipse console. It says full story. You should get 'SUCCESS' message at the end of the build. Similar output as follows.

-------------------------------------
[INFO] Installing /home/vinesh/workspace-maaven/shims/shims-web/pom.xml to /home/vinesh/.m2/repository/com/semika/shims-web/1.0-SNAPSHOT/shims-web-1.0-SNAPSHOT.pom
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Reactor Summary:
[INFO] [INFO] shims ............................................. SUCCESS [1.093s]
[INFO] shims-core ........................................ SUCCESS [2.005s]
[INFO] shims-web Maven Webapp ............................ SUCCESS [1.027s]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 4.354s
[INFO] Finished at: Sat Nov 03 22:37:27 IST 2012
[INFO] Final Memory: 6M/103M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Let's deploy our application. I am using Apache tomcat7 to deploy my application. If you see inside the target directory of 'shims-web' module after the successful build, you can see,maven has create 'shims-web.war' file. Copy that file into tomcat's webapps folder and start the tomcat.

Point your browser the following URL.

http://localhost:8080/shims-web/

You should get hello world page. 

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Full stack trace for "SEVERE: Error listenerStart"

One of the very painful error, I have received when starting the tomcat 'SEVERE: Error listenerStart'. I can not even understand why tomcat is giving errors in such a poor manner by wasting lots of our time. This is server error, but it does not give enough information to get rid of that. 

As it says, this may be some configuration problems which failed creation of some listener. For example, it may be some problem with your spring configuration which prevents creating ContextLoaderListener.

Sometime, this may be a problem of misconfiguration of a filter. You may have configured a filter in web.xml, but the relevant filter class is not found. 

Most of you will happy, if we can get the full stack trace of above exception.You can create 'logging.properties' file in your project source so that, it will be in 'classes' folder  of your deployment archive. You can place it within 'src' folder or within 'resources' folder in your source based on your project type. The project may be tomcat project or maven project or dynamic web project. 

After creating that file, place the following contents within it.

org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].level = INFO
org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].handlers = java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler

Now try to start the tomcat and you will see full stack trace of above poor indication.

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How to configure Apache HTTP server with Tomcat on SSL ?

Introduction

I recently needed to simulate our production deployment environment in my local machine. Our production applications are running on Apache HTTP server. We deploy application on multiple tomcat instances and also different Tomcats for different URL name spaces. Apache HTTP server is responsible as front door for all these. Apache HTTP server connects to the tomcat with mod_jk over mod_ssl. When Apache HTTP server receives a request, it checks for the requests and forward to the tomcat accordingly. This configuration is important for security and clustering.

This tutorial contains following section.

1. Installing and configuring Apache HTTP server. 
2. Installing and configuring Apache tomcat. 
3. Installing and configuring mod_jk. 
4. Configuring mod_ssl. 
5. Testing the environment.

Installing and configuring Apache HTTP server.

Run the following command to download Apache HTTP server 2.2.22

wget http://mirrors.gigenet.com/apache//httpd/httpd-2.2.22.tar.bz2
wget http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/httpd-2.2.22.tar.bz2.md5
md5sum -c httpd-2.2.22.tar.bz2.md5

After executing above command, httpd-2.2.22.tar.bz2 archive will be downloaded to your "Downloads" folder. Also you can directly download the apache server from the following location as well.

http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi#apache22

To extract the zipped archive file, run the following command from /Downloads folder.

cd /home/semika/Downloads
tar -xjvf httpd-2.2.22.tar.bz2

Above command will extract the zipped archive file into httpd-2.2.22 folder under Downloads folder. Now, you should decide where you are going to install Apache HTTP server. I am going to install it to /home/semika/httpd-2.2.22 folder. You have to create the folder there. Navigate to your user folder and execute the following command to create new folder.

cd /home/semika
mkdir httpd-2.2.22

To install Apache to your particular platform, we need to compile the source distribution that we have already downloaded. If you see carefully inside the extracted folder under Downloads/httpd-2.2.22, you can see there is a configure script. We can compile the source distribution with that script and it will create necessary stuff to install Apache HTTP server.

When compiling Apache, various options can be specified that are suited to our local environment. For the complete reference of options provided, see here.

Since, we need mod_ssl to be configured with Apache compilation, we need to install OpenSSL development bundle. Otherwise, compilation will raise an exception. To install OpenSSL development libraries, run the following command.

sudo apt-get install openssl libssl-dev

Sometime, You might need to run the following command as well, if you encounter an error while apache compilation.

sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev
sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev

To compile Apache source distribution, execute the following commands.

cd /home/semika/Downloads/httpd-2.2.22

./configure --prefix=/home/semika/httpd-2.2.22 --enable-mods-shared=all --enable-log_config=static --enable-access=static --enable-mime=static --enable-setenvif=static --enable-dir=static -enable-ssl=yes

--prefix                        : You can specify the installation directory
--enable-mods-shared : Setting this to 'all' will enable to install all the shared modules.
--enable-ssl                 : Since we are going to configure Apache HTTP server with mod_ssl, this has been set to 'yes' to compile Apache with mod_ssl. By default this option is disabled.

For other options specified in the configuration command, please look into full options reference documentation. After successfully running the above command, execute the following commands. Before execute the following command, just have look on your specified installation directory, ie:/home/semika/httpd-2.2.22, you can see that it is still empty.

make
make install

Now, you can see Apache HTTP server has been installed under /home/semika/httpd-2.2.22. Look for modules folder, you can see the list of modules installed. Confirm, whether it has installed mod_ssl.so. Now, you can start the Apache HTTP server.

cd /home/semika/httpd-2.2.22/bin
sudo ./apachectl start

If you see bellow line when executing the above command, 

"httpd: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1 for ServerName" 

edit your /httpd-2.2.22/conf/httpd.conf file as follows. Look for "ServerName" property in httpd.conf file. You will see following line there.

#ServerName www.example.com:80

Uncomment this line and modify it as follows.

ServerName localhost

Again start the Apache HTTP server. If you did not change the default port which Apache server is running, check the following URL to check whether server is started or not. The default Apache HTTP server running port is 80. 

http://localhost/

With the above URL, if you see a page with "It works", you are done with Apache HTTP server.

Further, if you want to change the default port, you can edit the httpd.conf file as follows. Look for "Listen" property and change it as you wish.

I have set it to 7000. So my Apache HTTP server is running on 7000. I have to access the following URL to get "It works" page.

http://localhost:7000/

To stop Apache HTTP server,execute the following command.

cd /home/semika/httpd-2.2.22/bin
sudo ./apachectl stop

Installing and configuring Apache tomcat. 

Installing and configuring Apache tomcat is not a big thing, if you are involving with this kind of advance configuration. For the completeness of the tutorial, I will explain that a little. I am using Apache Tomcat 7.0.25. You can download it from Apache web site and extract it to some where in you local machine. After that, you have to set the environment variable as follows.

export CATALINA_HOME=/home/semika/apache-tomcat-7.0.25
export PATH=$CATALINA_HOME/bin:$PATH

You can start the tomcat with following command.

cd home/semika/apache-tomcat-7.0.25/bin
./startup.sh

If you want to see tomcat's console out put, execute the following commands before starting the tomcat.

cd home/semika/apache-tomcat-7.0.25/logs/
tail -f catalina.out 

After successfully starting the tomcat, try the following URL

http://localhost:8080/ 

By default, tomcat will run on port 8080. Now our Apache HTTP server is running on port 7000 and tomcat is on 8080. 

Further, to configure Tomcat with Apache HTTP server, we need to create workers.properties file under home/semika/apache-tomcat-7.0.25/conf/. 

workers.properties

# Define 1 real worker named ajp13
worker.list=ajp13

# Set properties for worker named ajp13 to use ajp13 protocol,
# and run on port 8009
worker.ajp13.type=ajp13
worker.ajp13.host=localhost
worker.ajp13.port=8009
worker.ajp13.lbfactor=50
worker.ajp13.cachesize=10
worker.ajp13.cache_timeout=600
worker.ajp13.socket_keepalive=1
worker.ajp13.socket_timeout=300

Apache HTTP server will connect to Tomcat through port 8009. If you see server.xml file under Tomcat's conf folder, you can see following connector declaration there.

<Connector port="8009" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" />

Installing and configuring mod_jk

If you look into httpd-2.2.22/modules folder, you can see mod_jk.so has been installed. The mod_jk is a connector for Apache HTTP server to connect to Apache Tomcat. To configure, you have to load mod_jk.so module to Apache HTTP server.

Edit /httpd-2.2.22/conf/httpd.conf file as follows. You need to add these properties.

# Load mod_jk module
# Update this path to match your modules location
LoadModule jk_module modules/mod_jk.so

# Where to find workers.properties
# Update this path to match your conf directory location
JkWorkersFile /home/semika/apache-tomcat-7.0.25/conf/workers.properties

# Where to put jk logs
# Update this path to match your logs directory location
JkLogFile /home/semika/apache-tomcat-7.0.25/logs/mod_jk.log

# Set the jk log level [debug/error/info]
JkLogLevel info

# Select the log format
JkLogStampFormat "[%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y]"

# JkOptions indicate to send SSL KEY SIZE,
JkOptions +ForwardKeySize +ForwardURICompat -ForwardDirectories

# JkRequestLogFormat set the request format
JkRequestLogFormat "%w %V %T"

# Send everything for context /rainyDay to worker ajp13
JkMount /rainyDay ajp13
JkMount /rainyDay/* ajp13

I guess most of the properties defined above are clear for you. What is 'JkMount' and '/rainyDay'. The 'rainyDay' is one of my application deployed on Apache Tomcat. It says that "Forward all the request to the Apache Tomcat that are coming with /rainyDay namespace". 

With that, we have finished the configuration of mod_jk. 

Now, We will test the environment. Try the following URL's.

http://localhost:8080/rainyDay

Nothing special about the above URL. Since I have deployed my 'rainyDay' application on Apache Tomcat, We can access the application even without configuring with Apache HTTP server using mod_jk. 

Now, try the following URL.

http://localhost:7000/rainyDay 

If you can access the application with above URL, our configuration is successful. We know that, We have not deployed the 'rainyDay' application on Apache HTTP server, but on Apache Tomcat and also Apache HTTP server is running on port 7000. We can still access the 'rainyDay' application deployed on Apache Tomcat via Apache HTTP server.

Now just try the following URL.  

https://localhost:7000/rainyDay 

With the above URL, you can not access the application since URL has https protocol. To access the application with https://, we need to configure SSL with Apache HTTP server.  

Configuring mod_ssl.

To enable SSL on Apache HTTP server, again you have to edit httpd.conf file. Open this file and look for the following line. 

# Secure (SSL/TLS) connections

#Include conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf

Uncomment the above line and open it. That is under /httpd-2.2.22/conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf. Look for the following properties.

SSLPassPhraseDialog  builtin
SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile "/home/semika/httpd-2.2.22/conf/server.crt"
SSLCertificateKeyFile "/home/semika/httpd-2.2.22/conf/server.key"

Uncomment, if some are already commented out. Next, we have to generate SSL certificate files, server.crt and server.key. To generate these file, execute the following commands.

cd /home/sermika/Downloads
openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 1024
openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr
openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in server.csr -signkey server.key -out server.crt

When executing above commands, it will ask for some details and also a password and you have to provide those. Also, you have keep this password in mind, because it will be needed to provide when starting Apache HTTP server.

To know more about the configuring SSL with Apache HTTP server, refer the this documentation. Now carefully look into /home/semika/Downloads folder. You can see the server.key and server.crt generated. You have to copy these two files into Apache HTTP server installation directory.

cd /home/semika/Downloads
cp server.crt /home/semika/httpd-2.2.22/conf/server.crt
cp server.key /home/semika/httpd-2.2.22/conf/server.key

Again open the httpd-ssl.conf file under /httpd-2.2.22/conf/extra. You can see </VirtualHost> element and some properties are defined within that element. Like we did in mod_jk configuration, here also, we have to declare the required application context URL's or any other URL's that are needed to be secured with SSL. You have to add JkMount declaration as follows.

</VirtualHost>
    ...........
    ...........
    JkMount /rainyDay ajp13
    JkMount /rainyDay/* ajp13
</VirtualHost> 

Now try the following URL's

https://localhost:7000/

This should load the "It works" page. I used the port 7000, because I have change the Apache HTTP server default port. You are successfully configured mod_ssl. 

Now try the following URL as well.

https://localhost:7000/rainyDay

You should be able to load the application.  

Testing the environment.

There is no any order of starting Apache Tomcat and Apache HTTP server. After starting your servers, you can test your configuration with following URL's.

http://localhost:8080/
If you see, Tomcat's home page, Tomcat configuration is successful.

http://localhost:8080/rainyDay

If you can access the application, you application is successfully deployed on Apache Tomcat. 

http://localhost:7000/
If you see "It works" page, Apache HTTP server is successfully configured.

http://localhost:7000/rainyDay

If it loads you application, mod_jk configuration with Apache HTTP server is successful. 

https://localhost:7000/

Again if you see "It works" page, mod_ssl configuration with Apache HTTP server is success. 

https://localhost:7000/rainyDay

Again if you can access the application, mod_ssl configuration with Apache HTTP server is success and Apache HTTP server properly handle all secure requests to 'rainyDay' application successfully.

References:

1. How to configure Apache HTTP server with mod_ssl. 
2. How To Install Apache 2 with SSL on Linux (with mod_ssl, openssl). 
3. The Apache Tomcat Connector - Webserver HowTo. 
4. Apache Module mod_ssl. 
5. configure - Configure the source tree.

Enable https:// on tomcat in two steps.

With this tutorial, I will explain, how to enable SSL (Secure Socket Layer) on tomcat 7 in tow steps.
Step 01: Create .keystore file.

Run the following command to generate .keystore file from $JAVA_HOME/bin.

On windows :

%JAVA_HOME%\bin\keytool -genkey -alias tomcat -keyalg RSA 

On linux:

$JAVA_HOME/bin/keytool -genkey -alias tomcat -keyalg RSA  

Step 02: Uncomment "SSL HTTP/1.1 Connector on port 8443" on $CATALINA_HOME/conf/server.xml and modify it as follows.

<Connector port="8443" protocol="HTTP/1.1" SSLEnabled="true"
              maxThreads="150" scheme="https" secure="true"
              clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS" 
              keystoreFile="${user.home}/.keystore" keystorePass="123@com"/>

The "keystorePass" is the password which you provided when generating .keystore file. Now restart the tomcat.

By default port 8443 keeps listening https requests. Open a browser and check the following URL.

https://localhost:8443

If you see tomcat's home page, you are done.