Your actual objective seems to be: 1. The current version of MyApplication must be deployed and running. If you're interested in trying out Chef - which seems

Your actual objective seems to be: 1. The current version of MyApplication must be deployed and running. If you're interested in trying out Chef - which seems like a good fit from your comment - read on. For tomcat you could take a look at this community-provided cookbook, which contains resources that make it simple: https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/application_java https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/application_java If you explicitly need to stop/start tomcat beforehand (I believe this resource does a restart after deploying your app) you can do that with the "service" resource built into Chef - though doing so may mean that you're restarting every time you converge the node, which is probably not what you're looking for.