Tomcat Installation

Written by Jennifer Young on January 17, 2020 (still in progress)

This guide is for CentOS 7

Step 0: Make sure Tomcat is not already installed

Run as root

   systemctl status tomcat

If you get an error saying there was no tomcat.service file found, then Tomcat has not yet been installed on this machine.

Step 1: Make sure Java is running on your machine

Check if java is already installed on your machine with

   java -version

You should get something that looks similar to this: openjdk version "1.8.0_232" OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_232-b09) OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.232-b09, mixed mode)

If java is not installed run the following (as root):

   yum install java-1.8.0-openjdk-devel

Step 2: Download the latest version of Tomcat from the website

https://tomcat.apache.org/download-90.cgi

Create tomcat user and directory

Tomcat should not be run as root. Create a tomcat user with fewer privileges. This will also create the /opt/tomcat directory on the machine where all tomcat files will be stored

   sudo useradd -m -U -d /opt/tomcat -s /bin/false tomcat

Extract the contents of the tar.gz file

As of the writing of this page, the latest version of Tomcat 9 is 9.0.30

   tar -xvzf apache-tomcat-9.0.30.tar.gz

Move the extracted files to /opt/tomcat

    sudo mv apache-tomcat-9.0.30 /opt/tomcat/

Optional: Create symbolic link for updates

   ln –s /opt/tomcat/apache-tomcat-9.0.30 /opt/tomcat/latest

Modify Tomcat User Permissions

   chown –R tomcat:tomcat /opt/tomcat
   sh -c 'chmod +x /opt/tomcat/latest/bin/*.sh'

Create a System Unit File

Create the tomcat.service file

   vim /etc/systemd/system/tomcat.service

Paste the below into the file

   [Unit]
   Description=Tomcat 9 servlet container
   After=network.target
   [Service]
   Type=forking
   User=tomcat
   Group=tomcat
   Environment="JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/jre"
   Environment="JAVA_OPTS=-Djava.security.egd=file:///dev/urandom"
   Environment="CATALINA_BASE=/opt/tomcat/latest"
   Environment="CATALINA_HOME=/opt/tomcat/latest"
   Environment="CATALINA_PID=/opt/tomcat/latest/temp/tomcat.pid"
   Environment="CATALINA_OPTS=-Xms32G -Xmx32G -server -XX:+UseParallelGC"
   ExecStart=/opt/tomcat/latest/bin/startup.sh
   ExecStop=/opt/tomcat/latest/bin/shutdown.sh
   [Install]
   WantedBy=multi-user.target

Change the Xms and Xmx according to how much memory you want to provide to Tomcat. Save and close the file.

Refresh system

   systemctl daemon-reload