4. Installing Tomcat

Download a binary distribution of Tomcat from the Apache Jakarta website:

http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/

If you don't want to run the Tomcat daemon as root, create a new user/group tomcat (first make sure that the UID and GID you use are still available by checking the files /etc/passwd and /etc/group):

groupadd -g 220 tomcat useradd -u 220 -g tomcat -c "Tomcat" -r -d /usr/local/tomcat -s "/sbin/nologin" tomcat

<TODO: better solution available?>

Extract the Tomcat distribution in a new directory:

cd /usr/local/ tar -zxvf .../jakarta-tomcat-xxx.tar.gz

Change the ownership of the Tomcat directory and make it available as /usr/local/tomcat/:

chown -R tomcat:tomcat /usr/local/jakarta-tomcat-xxx ln -s /usr/local/jakarta-tomcat-xxx /usr/local/tomcat

Open up the firewall for web access to the Tomcat server by adding to the file /etc/sysconfig/iptables:

-A RH-Lokkit-0-50-INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 8080 --syn -j ACCEPT

You need to reboot your system to make this rule effective or restart the iptables firewall:

service iptables restart

To run Tomcat, set the $CATALINA_HOME environment variable:

CATALINA_HOME=/usr/local/tomcat

and fire it up:

/usr/local/tomcat/bin/startup.sh

Now you can access Tomcat's home page through (replace <hostname> with your hostname):

http://<hostname>:8080/

which should give you the Tomcat welcome screen.

To shutdown again:

/usr/local/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh

Since we want to automate the starting up and shutting down of the Tomcat server, we create a file /etc/rc.d/init.d/tomcat to do this for us:

#!/bin/sh # # Startup script for the Jakarta Tomcat Java Servlets and JSP server # # chkconfig: - 85 15 # description: Jakarta Tomcat Java Servlets and JSP server # processname: tomcat # pidfile: /var/run/tomcat.pid # config: # Source function library. . /etc/rc.d/init.d/functions # Source networking configuration. . /etc/sysconfig/network # Check that networking is up. [ ${NETWORKING} = "no" ] && exit 0 # Set Tomcat environment. export JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/j2sdk export CLASSPATH=.:/usr/local/j2sdk/lib/tools.jar:/usr/local/j2re/lib/rt.jar export CATALINA_HOME=/usr/local/tomcat export CATALINA_OPTS="-server -Xms64m -Xmx512m -Dbuild.compiler.emacs=true" export PATH=/usr/local/j2sdk/bin:/usr/local/j2re/bin:$PATH [ -f /usr/local/tomcat/bin/startup.sh ] || exit 0 [ -f /usr/local/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh ] || exit 0 export PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin # See how we were called. case "$1" in start) # Start daemon. echo -n "Starting Tomcat: " /usr/local/tomcat/bin/startup.sh RETVAL=$? echo [ $RETVAL = 0 ] && touch /var/lock/subsys/tomcat ;; stop) # Stop daemons. echo -n "Shutting down Tomcat: " /usr/local/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh RETVAL=$? echo [ $RETVAL = 0 ] && rm -f /var/lock/subsys/tomcat ;; restart) $0 stop $0 start ;; condrestart) [ -e /var/lock/subsys/tomcat ] && $0 restart ;; status) status tomcat ;; *) echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart|status}" exit 1 esac exit 0

Set its ownership and access rights:

chown root:root /etc/rc.d/init.d/tomcat chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/init.d/tomcat

And add this init script to chkconfig:

chkconfig --add tomcat chkconfig tomcat on