Submitted by brians on
This posting assumes that you've already installed a Java Development Kit (not just a Java Runtime Environment) and that your system is ready to compile and run Java applications. It also assumes that you will be working with Tomcat 6 or a later version.
To install Tomcat, download the latest core binary release from http://tomcat.apache.org. I suggest unpacking it into your server's /opt directory, and then create a symbolic link that points /opt/tomcat to the unpacked Tomcat directory.
Next we create a local configuration and execution environment for your Tomcat install, so that any future Tomcat upgrades will not overwrite your existing setup.
Web applications that connect to a database will need access to JAR files that provide drivers for that database. The best place to put these JAR files is in Tomcat's $CATALINA_HOME/lib directory, which makes them accessible to all web applications. If you've already installed the MySQL and PostgreSQL JDBC drivers on a Debian-compatible system, the procedure to create symbolic links to these JARs is:
Keep in mind that whenever you upgrade your Tomcat installation to a new release, each of these symbolic links will need to be rebuilt within the upgraded system.
Our next step is to create the /etc/init.d/tomcat initscript and populate it with the following code:
You can then add Tomcat to the initscripts so that it will be started upon bootup.
Now your /opt/localhost tree is ready to be configured and populated with web applications. More on this in a future posting.
When a Tomcat upgrade is released, upgrading this setup is simply a matter of stopping Tomcat, unpacking the new tarball into /opt, pointing the /opt/tomcat symlink to the newly unpacked directory, recreating the symbolic links in /opt/tomcat/lib that provide access to database drivers and other JARs, and then restarting Tomcat.
cd /opt tar -xzvf /<path to downloaded file>/apache-tomcat-6.0.20.tar.gz ln -s /opt/apache-tomcat-6.0.20 /opt/tomcat
for DIR in logs temp webapps work conf; do mkdir -p /opt/localhost/${DIR}; done cp -a /opt/tomcat/conf/* /opt/localhost/conf/
cd /opt/tomcat/lib ln -s /usr/share/java/mysql.jar ln -s /usr/share/java/postgresql.jar
#!/bin/sh ### BEGIN INIT INFO # Provides: tomcat # Required-Start: # Required-Stop: # Default-Start: 3 4 5 # Default-Stop: 0 1 2 6 # Short-Description: Tomcat Java application server ### END INIT INFO set -e export CATALINA_HOME="/opt/tomcat" export CATALINA_BASE="/opt/localhost" # Check that the startup and shutdown scripts are installed [ -x $CATALINA_HOME/bin/startup.sh ] || exit 0 [ -x $CATALINA_HOME/bin/shutdown.sh ] || exit 0 # Get LSB functions . /lib/lsb/init-functions . /etc/default/rcS case "$1" in start) echo $"Starting Tomcat" $CATALINA_HOME/bin/startup.sh ;; stop) echo $"Stopping Tomcat" $CATALINA_HOME/bin/shutdown.sh ;; *) echo $"Usage: $0 {start|stop}" exit 1 ;; esac exit $RETVAL
update-rc.d tomcat defaults