Introduction

This is a method of installing and running Tomcat in a way that is portable and part of the BonsaiFramework 0FS approach. Tar (zip) up the directory and move your entire application server or duplicate it with a copy command.

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Shortcut

Everything is all packaged up at http://www.bonsaiframework.com/downloads/0fs-tomcat-linux/,

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For audit purposes, make sure to log in with your own staff id first and then sudo into serveradmin for managing Tomcat. In true Cloud world where everything works as a recipe, use your recipes to make Tomcat adjustments.

Directory Structure

The directory structure will be as follows,

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su - bhitch # We need a staff user who can sudo
cd /opt
sudo mkdir apache
sudo chown -R serveradmin:staff ./apache # Make sure serveradmin can use the folder.

Manually Setup JRE

Leave the setup Java folder alone for now. It will be moved into the Tomcat folder as part of the Tomcat setup.

Manually Setup Tomcat

By manually setting up Tomcat there is much more control and you can run multiple tomcat instances. Download tomcat. The tar.gz file is used because permissions are already setup such as execute for startup.sh. A zip file will lose the permissions.

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sudo tar -czvf 0fs-tomcat.tar.gz ./0fs-tomcat/

Change Default Ports

Normally it's fine to leave Tomcat on the default port. However, for this exercise we are going learn how to change ports on both instances.

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cd /opt/apache/tomcat.1/conf/
sed -i 's/8005/8105/' server.xml
sed -i 's/8009/8109/' server.xml
sed -i 's/8080/8180/' server.xml
sed -i 's/8443/8543/' server.xml

Fix Tomcat catalina.out Logging

Tomcat Logging has a bug where if catalina.out reaches over  (need to research) logging stops working. Worse if over 2GB Tomcat will not start and also not report any errors. Yes this is pretty crazy that this is not fixed.

Ubuntu

Edit the bin/catalina.sh,

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This solution comes from VMWare who now owns SpringSource. Caveat is that the incorrect process ID being written to the process ID file so I don't like this solution as it will impact shutdown scripts.

Windows

Research

http://java.dzone.com/articles/how-rotate-tomcat-catalinaout?utm_source=am6_feedtweet&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=toya256ForRSS - talks about using logrotate (there is a slice of time where the log stops working). Also has a patch to tomcat so this solution works in Solaris.

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Article by Spring Source using cronolog - http://www.tomcatexpert.com/knowledge-base/rotating-catalinaout-log-files

Naming the Tomcat Process for Solaris (solved)

Solaris' built in ps has a specific limitation of 60 characters. As a result, it is not intuitive to determine which process of tomcat is which when the ps command is executed,

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serveradmin 12150 13290   1 11:51:28 pts/2       0:10 /opt/apache/tomcat.1/java -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoad
serveradmin  5906 13290   0   Jul 24 ?           6:17 /opt/apache/tomcat.2/java -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoad

Only Allow serveradmin to Run Tomcat

Setting up and running Tomcat with serveradmin has the advantage that you can manage the Application server without having to go into root. We want to ensure that only serveradmin starts Tomcat to prevent any issues with permissions. For example, once you start Tomcat1 as root you may find that log files spawned from that startup can no longer be managed by serveradmin. Also, by running Tomcat1s serveradmin rather than root is safer from a security standpoint.

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#!/bin/sh

# Bonsaiframework - Modification Start
# --------------------------------------
if [ "$LOGNAME" != "serveradmin" ]; then
echo "This service should only managed with the user serveradmin"
exit 1
fi
# --------------------------------------
# Bonsaiframework - Modification End

# Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more

Run Tomcat with a Specific Java Version Using setenv.sh

Tomcat can be run with a separate version of JRE or JDK that is not the default system version. To do so, you will have to explicitly set the JRE_HOME variable. The JAVA_HOME variable is also configured as some applications will want to make use of this variable instead.

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Using this method, you can have different Tomcat instances running different versions of Java and control when you want to move between Java versions.

Setup Tomcat2

In this example we are going to run with 2 instances of tomcat where we will load balance between them. So we duplicate the tomcat directory with a slightly different directory name,

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cd /opt/apache/tomcat.2/conf
sed -i 's/8105/8205/' server.xml
sed -i 's/8109/8209/' server.xml
sed -i 's/8180/8280/' server.xml
sed -i 's/8543/8643/' server.xml

Verify

Finally startup your Tomcat instances and verify that they are listening,

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If your server has a web browser you can load the examples page using http://localhost:8180/examples/. From another computer you can see the examples application by browsing to, http://www.krypton.com:8180/examples/ where if www.krypton.com is not a real dns, use the server's IP address or add a host file entry to your client system.

Additional Layers

In my experience all my real world systems do not need any more layers to Tomcat. However, there are some odd scenarios which are covered here.

Automatic Startup and Shutdown of Tomcat

Not recommend until you proper monitoring in place. If you system reboots you want to know about it.

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Setup SSL on Tomcat

For testing purposes or if the only thing you want to do is encrypt the channel of communication you can Setup a Self-Signed Certificate for Tomcat.

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UTF-8

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<Connector port="8109" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8643" URIEncoding="UTF-8" />

References

http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/FAQ/CharacterEncoding#Q9 - still to finish reading

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