Developing with Tomcat user instances

In today’s post, I’ll take you through installing Apache Tomcat for the purposes of development.

Installing a user instance

To get started, install tomcat8 as you normally would:

$ sudo apt-get install tomcat8

For the purposes of development, it makes sense to have your own instance of tomcat which is away from the system installation. The tomcat8-user package allows you to do just that.

$ sudo apt-get install tomcat8-user

After this install is complete, you can create yourself a local tomcat instance that you can blow up without hurting the system’s version. You do this with the tomcat8-instance-create command:

$ tomcat7-instance-create -p 10080 -c 10005 tomcat

The switches -p puts this instance listening for application requests on port 10080 and the -c switch puts the control port on 10005.

After you’ve done this, you’ll be notified by the console.

You are about to create a Tomcat instance in directory 'tomcat'
* New Tomcat instance created in tomcat
* You might want to edit default configuration in tomcat/conf
* Run tomcat/bin/startup.sh to start your Tomcat instance

The directory that has been setup for you now looks like this:

.
├── bin
│   ├── setenv.sh
│   ├── shutdown.sh
│   └── startup.sh
├── conf
│   ├── catalina.properties
│   ├── context.xml
│   ├── logging.properties
│   ├── server.xml
│   ├── tomcat-users.xml
│   └── web.xml
├── logs
├── temp
├── webapps
└── work

Integrating with Eclipse

To get Eclipse to play nicely with your user-local version of tomcat, you’ll still need to add a few components. This tip is largly based off of the information in this stack overflow question.

$ ln -s /usr/share/tomcat8/lib
$ cp /etc/tomcat8/policy.d/03catalina.policy conf/catalina.policy
$ ln -s /usr/share/tomcat8/bin/bootstrap.jar bin/bootstrap.jar
$ ln -s /usr/share/tomcat8/bin/tomcat-juli.jar bin/tomcat-juli.jar
$ mkdir -p common/classes;
$ mkdir -p server/classes;
$ mkdir -p shared/classes;

You can now add your local user instance of tomcat to Eclipse.