Installing Tomcat, Quickly

Step 0, See if you already have one.
Point your browser to http://your.host.name:8080/. If you actually get something back, there's probably already a Tomcat running. If so, you should probably ask whoever installed it to give you an account on it with the "manager" role. If you can't find the person, or they won't help you, try some other ports until you find one not in use, e.g. http://your.host.name:8081/, http://your.host.name:8088/, etc. Anything above 1024.
Step 1: Downloading the "Core" Tomcat.
- Unix/Linux/MacOSX: Download the zip file to the directory you want it installed under ("/usr/local" in this example, because I'll pretend I'm root, and I have permission to write there.).
- Windows: Download the self-installer to wherever you want. You'll probably need to have administrative privileges in order to proceed past here.
Step 2: Unpack it.
- Unix/Linux/MacOSX: Unzip the file. It'll expand into a directory called apache-tomcat-5.5.17
```
cd /usr/local
unzip apache-tomcat-5.5.17.zip
```
  If you needed to change the port in Step 0 (e.g. to 8888), you'll need to edit /usr/local/apache-tomcat-5.5.17/conf/server.xml too. Change the line that starts
```
<Connector port="8080"...
```
  to
```
<Connector port="8888"...
```
- Windows: Double click the installer icon, and perform a "Normal" installation. Port 8080 is the default, be sure to change it if necessary according to Step 0.

Step 3: Give yourself an account.

Unix/Linux/MacOSX: Change the default user file /usr/local/conf/tomcat-users.xml to look like this (substituting mysecret for something else of course):

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<tomcat-users>
  <role rolename="tomcat"/>
  <role rolename="role1"/>
  <role rolename="standard"/>
  <role rolename="manager"/>
  <user username="tomcat" password="tomcat" roles="tomcat"/>
  <user username="admin" password="mysecret" roles="standard,manager"/>
  <user username="role1" password="tomcat" roles="role1"/>
  <user username="both" password="tomcat" roles="tomcat,role1"/>
</tomcat-users>

Windows: in step 2 you created the admin account.

Step 4: Start the servlet container.
- Unix/Linux/MacOSX:
```
/usr/local/apache-tomcat-5.5.17/bin/startup.sh
```
- Windows: Click your start menu or system tray icon.
Now you're ready to create your MOBY service!

Configuring Tomcat as a daemon

If you plan on continuing to provide servlet service, you should configure Tomcat start automatically whenever the server is restarted. Details can be found here.

Paul Gordon

Last modified: Tue Dec 5 09:23:31 MST 2006