Installing Apache Tomcat 6 on Ubuntu (8.04 / 8.10)

Before we install Tomcat you’ll need to make sure that whether we already have installed Java. Let’s assume that we are trying to install Tomcat we’ve already installed java, but if we aren’t sure we can check with the dpkg command like so:

dpkg –get-selections | grep sun-java

This should give we this output if we already installed java:

sun-java6-bin                                   install
sun-java6-jdk                                   install
sun-java6-jre                                   install

If that command has no results, we’ll want to install the latest version with this command:

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk

Installation

Now we’ll download and extract Tomcat from the apache site. We should check to make sure there’s not another version and adjust accordingly.

wget http://apache.host.com/tomcat/tomcat-6/v6.0.14/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.14.tar.gz

tar xvzf apache-tomcat-6.0.14.tar.gz

The best thing to do is move the tomcat folder to a permanent location. I chose /usr/local/tomcat.

sudo mv apache-tomcat-6.0.14 /usr/local/tomcat

Tomcat requires setting the JAVA_HOME variable. The best way to do this is to set it in the .bashrc file.

The better method is editing the .bashrc file and adding the bolded line there. We’ll have to logout of the shell for the change to take effect.

vi ~/.bashrc

Add the following line:

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

At this point we can start tomcat by just executing the startup.sh script in the tomcat/bin folder.

Automatic Starting

To make tomcat automatically start when we boot up the computer, we can add a script to make it auto-start and shutdown.

sudo vi /etc/init.d/tomcat

Now paste in the following:

# Tomcat auto-start
#
# description: Auto-starts tomcat
# processname: tomcat
# pidfile: /var/run/tomcat.pid

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

case $1 in
start)
sh /usr/local/tomcat/bin/startup.sh
;;
stop)
sh /usr/local/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh
;;
restart)
sh /usr/local/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh
sh /usr/local/tomcat/bin/startup.sh
;;
esac
exit 0

We’ll need to make the script executable by running the chmod command:

sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/tomcat

The last step is actually linking this script to the startup folders with a symbolic link. Execute these two commands and we should be on our way.

sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/tomcat /etc/rc1.d/K99tomcat
sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/tomcat /etc/rc2.d/S99tomcat

Tomcat should now be fully installed and operational. Cheers!

Thanks

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