A package artifact is a deployable artifact. It may contain one or more application artifacts, which can be tools, web applications or any other resources you need to deploy, for example an Apache configuration overlay or a Tomcat installation. The main purpose of a package artifact is to add an installation infrastructure. In case of simple Zip artifacts this can be a set of shell or batch scripts. In case of a native package, an RPM for example, the native package manager provides the infrastructure to install a package artifact.
Package artifacts may be configured at build time with default values or with filter tokens, that can be replaced after the installation on the target machine (see Section 4.3.9, “Configure Filtering in the Workspace” for details).
Tomcat based Services
In case a package artifact repackages a set of WAR application artifacts, the package artifact
wraps a Tomcat configuration stub around one or more web applications and adds the
infrastructure to register the Tomcat instance as a service. A Tomcat configuration stub
contains only the necessary configuration files of a Tomcat and the web applications it should
start. A common Tomcat installation, identified by an environment variable
CATALINA_HOME, can then be used to start an instance of itself using an
environment variable CATALINA_BASE pointing to the Tomcat configuration stub.
This way you don't need to package a whole Tomcat installation with each service package
artifact.
For an overview of the default layout used for Linux/Unix, see Section 9.3, “Linux / Unix Installation Layout”.
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