Apache Tomcat on Fedora 14

Apache Tomcat is a free and open source software implementation for Java Servlets. It provides support for the Java Server Pages (JSP) that power many popular web-based applications.

This guide assumes that you have a working installation of Fedora 14, and that you have followed our Setting Up and Securing a Compute Instance to get your system working and up to date. If you are new to Linux server administration, you may be interested in our introduction to Linux concepts guide, beginner’s guide and administration basics guide.

Set the Hostname

Before you begin installing and configuring the components described in this guide, please make sure you’ve followed our instructions for setting your hostname. Issue the following commands to make sure it is set properly:

hostname
hostname -f

The first command should show your short hostname, and the second should show your fully qualified domain name (FQDN).

Install Apache Tomcat

Issue the following command to install the latest version of Tomcat 6, along with the OpenJDK runtime environment and developer tools:

yum update
yum install tomcat6 tomcat6-webapps tomcat6-admin-webapps java-1.6.0-openjdk-devel.i686
chkconfig tomcat6 on

Issue the following command to ensure that the file permissions of crucial folders are set properly:

chmod -R g+w /var/log/tomcat6 /etc/tomcat6/Catalina /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/ /var/log/tomcat6/ /var/cache/tomcat6/temp /var/cache/tomcat6/work

Start the tomcat6 service with the following command:

/etc/init.d/tomcat6 start

Tomcat should now be totally functional. In the future, if you need to start, stop, or restart, you can use the following commands:

/etc/init.d/tomcat6 start
/etc/init.d/tomcat6 stop
/etc/init.d/tomcat6 restart

Test and use Tomcat

You can test your Tomcat installation by pointing your browser to http://[yourdomain-or-ip-address]:8080/. By default, files are located at /usr/share/tomcat6/webapps/.

At this point, you may want to create a user to access the “Tomcat Manager” web application. This will give you some information concerning your Tomcat instance, as well as some demo applications for testing. To add a user, edit the /etc/tomcat6/tomcat-users.xml file to include the following line, substituting your own username and password. Make sure you keep the “manager” role.

File: /etc/tomcat6/tomcat-users.xml

1	<user name="username" password="examplemorris" roles="manager" />

Once you have saved the tomcat-users.xml file, restart the tomcat6 service with the following command:

/etc/init.d/tomcat6 restart

At this point, you will be able to log in to the Tomcat Manager application and begin deploying Java Servlets with Apache Tomcat!

More Information

You may wish to consult the following resources for additional information on this topic. While these are provided in the hope that they will be useful, please note that we cannot vouch for the accuracy or timeliness of externally hosted materials.

• Tomcat Home Page
• Tomcat FAQ