Testing Java EE application with Spock

I have several Spock end to end tests which make http requests to a Java Web Application to test a bunch of REST APIs. However, I am not using Spring boot and can't. So, it's just a Java EE application deployed on Tomcat. This means I have to ensure my app is deployed before I run the tests. Is there any way, I can configure Spock to start the web application (i.e. use a Jetty gradle plugin) before running the tests?