Tomcat Versions

KeyJey

Hi, I need to deploy a tomcat VPS for a client that has some WAR files dated 3 years ago. But what version to install ? I see versions 6 to 8. Shall I install the latest and those WARs will work on it ? Should I install version 6 coz it's older ?

Also, any nice and easy howto to install Tomcat for centos ?

Thanks !

kingpin

It depends on what version of Servlet specification your web app has been compiled against. If it's 2.6 then Tomcat 6 will do. If it's 3.0 then you'll want Tomcat 7.

Either way you can try both versions of Tomcat and see which one works for you.

I would give Tomcat 6 a shot first, as it is available from the official repository and doesn't require changes to your system. Make sure you run the commands you see bellow with root privileges (possibly using sudo).

Okay, to install Tomcat from the public repo, just say this in your favourite shell.

yum install tomcat6

Then start Tomcat.

service tomcat6 start

Once Tomcat is up and running, you can go ahead and deploy your app. You can do so by just dropping the .war file into the following directory.

/usr/share/tomcat/webapps/

Once the file is there, Tomcat will detect its presence and will attempt to carry out the deployment of the app. Just take a look into the log file.

tail -f /var/log/tomcat/catalina.out

You should see something along the lines of.

INFO: Deploying web application archive /var/lib/tomcat/webapps/myapp.war

If the deployment was successful, you'll see the new directory myapp.

ls /var/lib/tomcat/webapps/

Now you can open your browser and head over to the home page of your app. By default Tomcat is listening on port number 8080 (can easily be changed in the config file), so you can reach your app like this.

http://example.com:8080/myapp/

If you see some output, then the app is deployed and launched. Otherwise check the server output log in catalina.out (as shown above) for errors.

If your app is compiled against Servlet version 3.0, you can spin up Tomcat 7. You may also want to uninstall Tomcat 6 first, of course.

yum erase tomcat6

Most of the distros I'm using and fiddling around with are based on RHEL 6, and Tomcat 7 is not available in the official repositories. What you would want to do to install Tomcat 7 in this case, is to use one of the third-party repos out there. I for one always end up using EPEL repository.

First off, grab EPEL RPM package and install it on your system.

wget http://mirror.logol.ru/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

rpm -Uvh epel-release-6*.rpm

This will make enable EPEL repository on your system, and new packages available to install including (but not limited to) Tomcat 7.

Then, install Tomcat 7.

yum install tomcat

And, finally, start Tomcat 7.

service tomcat start

Once you're done with installation, you can conduct web app deployment just as outlined above.

Hope that helps.

Feel free to ask if you run into problems.

Have a nice day!

KeyJey

Developer just told me that it's Tomcat 6, but he will confirm later when at home.

I tried to install Tomcat6 and all went fine, also I already started the service without any problem, disabled the firewall, and see the port 8080 listening, but when I try to go to admin URL I just see a blank screen. ¿?

kingpin

KeyJey said: but when I try to go to admin URL I just see a blank screen

Just install one of the following packages depending on the Tomcat version you installed (6 or 7, respectively).

tomcat6-admin-webapps.noarch

tomcat-admin-webapps.noarch

The package contains the host-manager and manager web applications for Tomcat.

You can also find other packages related to Tomcat as follows.

yum search tomcat

This will give you a list of packages and their short descriptions.

To get the detailed package description you can use info command of yum, for example.

yum info tomcat-admin-webapps

KeyJey

Installed successfully the tomcat6-admin-webapps via yum, but after restart I see this error trying to deploy the new package:

INFO: Deploying configuration descriptor host-manager.xml
May 12, 2015 11:28:34 a.m. org.apache.catalina.startup.TldConfig lifecycleEvent
SEVERE: Error processing TLD files for context path /host-manager
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: URI "file:./" is not hierarchical

So same error ... blank screen.

KeyJey

going to the URL:8080/manager:

type Status report
message /manager/
description The requested resource (/manager/) is not available.

socials

Google.

I found three similar problems and three possible solutions after googling for 2 minutes. Don't be so lazy.

KeyJey

At the end, the version I was needing was Tomcat 7, and all is UP and working.