There are several ways to set up Tomcat for running on different platforms. The main documentation for this is a file called RUNNING.txt. We encourage you to refer to that file if the information below does not answer some of your questions.
Installing Tomcat on Windows can be done easily using the Windows installer. Its interface and functionality is similar to other wizard based installers, with only a few items of interest.
/C=<config file>
command line argument. The configuration file uses the format name=value
with each pair on a separate line. The names of the available configuration options are: /C=...
along with /S
and /D=
it is possible to perform fully configured unattended installs of Apache Tomact. The installer will create shortcuts allowing starting and configuring Tomcat. It is important to note that the Tomcat administration web application can only be used when Tomcat is running.
Tomcat can be run as a daemon using the jsvc tool from the commons-daemon project. Source tarballs for jsvc are included with the Tomcat binaries, and need to be compiled. Building jsvc requires a C ANSI compiler (such as GCC), GNU Autoconf, and a JDK.
Before running the script, the JAVA_HOME
environment variable should be set to the base path of the JDK. Alternately, when calling the ./configure
script, the path of the JDK may be specified using the --with-java
parameter, such as ./configure --with-java=/usr/java
.
Using the following commands should result in a compiled jsvc binary, located in the $CATALINA_HOME/bin
folder. This assumes that GNU TAR is used, and that CATALINA_HOME
is an environment variable pointing to the base path of the Tomcat installation.
Please note that you should use the GNU make (gmake) instead of the native BSD make on FreeBSD systems.
cd $CATALINA_HOME/bintar xvfz commons-daemon-native.tar.gzcd commons-daemon-1.1.x-native-src/unix./configuremakecp jsvc ../..cd ../..
Tomcat can then be run as a daemon using the following commands.
CATALINA_BASE=$CATALINA_HOMEcd $CATALINA_HOME./bin/jsvc \ -classpath $CATALINA_HOME/bin/bootstrap.jar:$CATALINA_HOME/bin/tomcat-juli.jar \ -outfile $CATALINA_BASE/logs/catalina.out \ -errfile $CATALINA_BASE/logs/catalina.err \ -Dcatalina.home=$CATALINA_HOME \ -Dcatalina.base=$CATALINA_BASE \ -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager \ -Djava.util.logging.config.file=$CATALINA_BASE/conf/logging.properties \ org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap
When runnong on Java 9 you will need to additionally specify the following when starting jsvc to avoid warnings on shutdown.
...--add-opens=java.base/java.lang=ALL-UNNAMED \--add-opens=java.base/java.io=ALL-UNNAMED \--add-opens=java.rmi/sun.rmi.transport=ALL-UNNAMED \...
You may also need to specify -jvm server
if the JVM defaults to using a server VM rather than a client VM. This has been observed on OSX.
jsvc has other useful parameters, such as -user
which causes it to switch to another user after the daemon initialization is complete. This allows, for example, running Tomcat as a non privileged user while still being able to use privileged ports. Note that if you use this option and start Tomcat as root, you'll need to disable the org.apache.catalina.security.SecurityListener
check that prevents Tomcat starting when running as root.
jsvc --help
will return the full jsvc usage information. In particular, the -debug
option is useful to debug issues running jsvc.
The file $CATALINA_HOME/bin/daemon.sh
can be used as a template for starting Tomcat automatically at boot time from /etc/init.d
with jsvc.
Note that the Commons-Daemon JAR file must be on your runtime classpath to run Tomcat in this manner. The Commons-Daemon JAR file is in the Class-Path entry of the bootstrap.jar manifest, but if you get a ClassNotFoundException or a NoClassDefFoundError for a Commons-Daemon class, add the Commons-Daemon JAR to the -cp argument when launching jsvc.
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