Lab 1: Installing Tomcat

Objective: In this lab, you will install Tomcat as a service on Ubuntu.

1. Login to your VM as the tomcat user. The password is simply password.
2. Keep track of your IP address. You will need it later in this lab:
3. Notice there is a Tomcat distribution already downloaded in the /home/tomcat directory. Use tar to unzip and extract the Tomcat distribution file.
4. It is a good practice to use a symbolic link for starting and stopping Tomcat. This makes it easier to upgrade to a different version in the future. Create a symbolic link for the Tomcat folder:

   sudo ln -s /home/tomcat/apache-tomcat-9.0.0.M19 /opt/tomcat-latest

   The sudo password for tomcat is password.
5. You now have /opt/tomcat-latest linked to your apache-tomcat-9.x install directory, but root created the link so you need to chown the link to tomcat:

   sudo chown -R tomcat:tomcat /opt/tomcat-latest

6. In this step, you will configure Tomcat as a service. There is a file already created for you that is designed for starting, stopping and restarting Tomcat as a service. Copy the file /home/tomcat/Lab_01/tomcat into /etc/init.d:

   cp /home/tomcat/Lab_01/tomcat /etc/init.d/

   
   The file looks like:

   # Service file for Tomcat
   #
   
   export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-i386/
   
   case $1 in
   start)
           sh /opt/tomcat-latest/bin/startup.sh
           ;;
   stop)
           sh /opt/tomcat-latest/bin/shutdown.sh
           ;;
   restart)
           sh /opt/tomcat-latest/bin/shutdown.sh
           sh /opt/tomcat-latest/bin/startup.sh
           ;;
   esac
   exit 0

7. chmod the tomcat init file to 755:

   sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/tomcat

8. You are now ready to start Tomcat as a service on your Ubuntu instance. Run the following command:

   service tomcat start

9. Verify that Tomcat is running by opening your Web browser and pointing it to your Tomcat instance. The URL will look like http://your_vm_ip:8080/ using the IP address from that you noted in step 2 of this lab. You should see the homepage of your Tomcat instance:
10. Stop your Tomcat instance:

    service tomcat stop

11. Setup Tomcat to start automatically when your VM starts by creating symbolic links to your init.d/tomcat script in the appropriate Ubuntu runlevel folders. Let's configure rc1 and rc2:

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

12. Reboot your VM:

    sudo reboot

13. Tomcat should be running. View your running processes to verify:

    ps -eaf | grep tomcat

    Also, go back to your Web browser and reload the Tomcat home page to verify your startup script is working properly.

Summary: You now have installed Tomcat and configured your server to run Tomcat as a service on startup.