Building a Tomcat 6 Appliance

TurnKey have done a great job of putting together a collection of open source software appliances using Ubuntu JeOS 8.04.  Unfortunately TurnKey’s Tomcat appliance uses only Tomcat 5.5, instead of Tomcat 6 featuring Servlet 2.5 and JSP 2.1 support, which was released in March 2007.  On the plus side, however, Turnkey have also published their appliance core, which you can use as the basis of your own appliances.  The core includes Webmin at port 12321 and SSH.  Turnkey appliances are distributed with no password for root so make sure to set it as as possible.  The hostname for Turnkey Core is ‘core’, but that can be changed by editing /etc/hostname.

Tomcat 6 has been backported to Ubuntu 8.04, so it is easy to add, just edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/sources.list and uncomment hardy-backports universe, then:

apt-get update
apt-get install tomcat6 # ~70MB

Note Tomcat6 is run with CATALINA_HOME set to /usr/share/tomcat6 and CATALINA_BASE set to /var/lib/tomcat6. If you read the Tomcat RUNNING.txt doc (available at /usr/share/doc/tomcat6-common/RUNNING.txt.gz) you’ll see that Tomcat6 is looking for libraries in CATALINA_HOME/lib and not CATALINA_BASE/lib. Since it is ignored, the presence of a CATALINA_BASE/lib directory is, at best, confusing.

Tomcat defaults to port 8080 and 8443.  As Tomcat is being run on the appliance as root we can change the ports to 80 and 443 by editing /etc/tomcat6/server.xml.

The tomcat service is managed using /etc/init.d/tomcat6 [start|stop], not bin/shutdown.sh.  Remember to turn off tomcat security or configure it for each application.  Turning off security is done by editing  /etc/init.d/tomcat6 and changing TOMCAT6_SECURITY=no.

There is a tomcat6-admin package also, but I do not use, and have not tested it.  To deploy a war file I simply copy it into /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps, eg.

apt-get install wget
cd /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps
wget http://.../...jar

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