I was having the same problem, and in my case the (relative) path to the WAR file was incorrect. Apparently if you don’t have it exactly correct (it needs to be relative to the workspace root) then the deploy plugin will silently fail. In my case the path was:
target/whatever.war
Once that was fixed, I ran into a different problem in that the plugin expects to connect to the manager/text version of Tomcat Manager, rather than the manager/html version that I usually configure by default. You’ll need a line in your tomcat-users.xml file like the following:
<user username=”tomcat” password=”pencil” roles=”manager-script”/>
(This is in addition to the “manager-gui” role you probably already have set up.)
Once those changes were made, the build and deployment worked just fine.