Tomcat can work in three different ways:
As a standalone servlet container. This is useful for debugging and testing, since it also acts a (rather crude) web server. We would not suggest you use it instead of Apache.
As an in-process servlet container running inside Apache’s address space. This gives good performance but is poor on scalability when your site’s traffic grows.
As an out-of-process servlet container, running in its own address space and communicating with Apache through TCP/IP sockets.
If you decide on 2 or 3, as you probably will, you have to choose which method to use and implement it accordingly.
Consequently, the installation of Tomcat involves two distinct processes: installing Tomcat and adapting Apache to link to it.
Normally we advocate building from source, but in the case of Java it can get tedious, so we decided to install Tomcat from the binary distribution, jakarta.-tomcat-3.3a.tar.gz in our case.
Installation of Tomcat is pretty simple. Having unpacked it, all you have to do is to set the environment variables:
JAVA_HOME to: /usr/src/java/jdk1.1.8 TOMCAT_HOME to /usr/src/tomcat/jakarta-tomcat-3.3a
(or the paths on your machine if they are different) and re-log in. Test that everything works by using the command:
ls $TOMCAT_HOME
If it doesn’t produce the contents of this directory, something is amiss.
Installation on Win32 systems is very similar. Set the path to the Tomcat directory by typing:
set TOMCAT_HOME =\usr\src\tomcat\jakarta-tomcat-3.3a"
The .../jakarta-tomcat-3.3a/bin directory contains two scripts: startup.sh, which sets Tomcat running, and shutdown.sh, which stops it. To test that everything is installed properly, go there and run the first. A good deal of screen chat ensues (after rather long pause). Note that the script detaches from the shell early on, so its hard to tell when its finished.
By default, Tomcat logs to the screen, which is not a good idea, so it is wise to modify conf/server.xml from:
...
<LogSetter name ="tc_log"
verbosityLevel="INFORMATION"
/>
...to:
...
<LogSetter name ="tc_log"
path="logs/tomcat.log"
verbosityLevel="INFORMATION"
/>
...The result is to transfer the screen messages to the log file.
If you now surf to port 8080 on your machine — we went to http://www.butterthlies.com:8080 — Tomcat will show you its home page, which lives at $TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/ROOT/index.html. Note that the page itself erroneously claims to be at $TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/index.html.
When you have had enough of this excitement, you can stop Tomcat with $TOMCAT_HOME/bin/shutdown.sh. If you try to start Tomcat without shutting it down first, you will get a fatal Java error.