Apache Tomcat is a web server and servlet container that is used to serve Java applications. Tomcat is an open source implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies, released by the Apache Software Foundation.
This tutorial covers the basic installation and some configuration of Tomcat 7 on your Ubuntu 14.04 server.
Note: Tomcat can be installed automatically on your Droplet by adding this script to its User Data when launching it. Check out this tutorial to learn more about Droplet User Data.
There are two basic ways to install Tomcat on Ubuntu:
For this tutorial, we will use the simplest method:
apt-get. Please note that this will install the latest release of Tomcat that is in the official Ubuntu repositories, which may or may not be the latest release of Tomcat. If you want to guarantee that you are installing the latest version of Tomcat, you can always download the latest binary distribution.
Before you begin with this guide, you should have a separate, non-root user account set up on your server. You can learn how to do this by completing steps 1-4 in the initial server setup for Ubuntu 14.04. We will be using the
demo user created here for the rest of this tutorial.
The first thing you will want to do is update your apt-get package lists:
- sudo apt-get update
Now you are ready to install Tomcat. Run the following command to start the installation:
- sudo apt-get install tomcat7
yes at the prompt to install tomcat. This will install Tomcat and its dependencies, such as Java, and it will also create the
tomcat7 user. It also starts Tomcat with its default settings.
Let’s make a quick change to the Java options that Tomcat uses when it starts. Open the Tomcat7 parameters file:
- sudo nano /etc/default/tomcat7
JAVA_OPTS line and replace it with the following. Feel free to change the
MaxPermSize values—these settings affect how much memory Tomcat will use:
JAVA_OPTS="-Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/./urandom -Djava.awt.headless=true -Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC"
Save and exit.
Now restart Tomcat with this command:
- sudo service tomcat7 restart
Tomcat is not completely set up yet, but you can access the default splash page by going to your domain or IP address followed by
:8080 in a web browser:
Open in web browser:http://server_IP_address:8080
You will see a splash page that says “It works!”, in addition to other information. Now we will go deeper into the installation of Tomcat.
Note: This section is not necessary if you are already familiar with Tomcat and you do not need to use the web management interface, documentation, or examples. If you are just getting into Tomcat for the first time, please continue.
With the following command, we will install the Tomcat online documentation, the web interface (manager webapp), and a few example webapps:
- sudo apt-get install tomcat7-docs tomcat7-admin tomcat7-examples
yes at the prompt to install these packages. We will get into the usage and configuration of these tools in a later section. Next, we will install the Java Development Kit.
If you are planning on developing apps on this server, you will want to be sure to install the software in this section.
The Java Development Kit (JDK) enables us to develop Java applications to run in our Tomcat server. Running the following command will install openjdk-7-jdk:
- sudo apt-get install default-jdk
In addition to JDK, the Tomcat documentation suggests also installing Apache Ant, which is used to build Java applications, and a source control system, such as git. Let’s install both of those with the following command:
- sudo apt-get install ant git
For more information about Apache Ant, refer to the official manual. For a tutorial on using git, refer to DigitalCloud’s Git Tutorial.
In order to use the manager webapp installed in Step 3, we must add a login to our Tomcat server. We will do this by editing the
- sudo nano /etc/tomcat7/tomcat-users.xml
This file is filled with comments which describe how to configure the file. You may want to delete all the comments between the following two lines, or you may leave them if you want to reference the examples:
<tomcat-users> ... </tomcat-users>
You will want to add a user who can access the
admin-gui (the management interface that we installed in Step Three). You can do so by defining a user similar to the example below. Be sure to change the username and password to something secure:
<tomcat-users> <user username="admin" password="password" roles="manager-gui,admin-gui"/> </tomcat-users>
Save and quit the tomcat-users.xml file. To put our changes into effect, restart the Tomcat service:
- sudo service tomcat7 restart
Now that we’ve configured an admin user, let’s access the web management interface in a web browser:
Open in web browser:http://server_IP_address:8080
You will see something like the following image:
As you can see, there are four links to packages you installed in Step Three:
Let’s take a look at the Web Application Manager, accessible via the link or
The Web Application Manager is used to manage your Java applications. You can Start, Stop, Reload, Deploy, and Undeploy here. You can also run some diagnostics on your apps (i.e. find memory leaks). Lastly, information about your server is available at the very bottom of this page.
Now let’s take a look at the Virtual Host Manager, accessible via the link or
From the Virtual Host Manager page, you can add virtual hosts to serve your applications in.
Your installation of Tomcat is complete! Your are now free to deploy your own webapps!
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Actually, by setting the following in /etc/default/tomcat7, I was fine: <pre> JAVA_OPTS=“-Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/./urandom -Djava.awt.headless=true -Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC” </pre>
Awesome tutorial. Thank you so much. For a new person to UBUNTU i really appreciate the help!
Great Tutorial, Works perfectly fine.
Hi. The above suggestions for fixing the slow Tomcat startup by changing your JAVA_OPTS to use a new random number generator are helpful, but not perfect. If you use one of the above strings, you’re ham-handedly changing all your JAVA_OPTS rather than simply adding the one you need. Doing this worked for me instead:
Inside $CATALINA_BASE/bin/catalina.sh, add the following (I added mine BELOW the existing commented-out “#JAVA_OPTS=” line at line # ~237):
This will keep your existing JAVA_OPTS while adding the new random generator. Note: There is no need to uncomment anything. Just add the new line.
Hello. May I have a question, please?
on the step 2. when I go to my ip:8080 it’s shown the message “It works!”
But after I have done everything to step 6 and I tried to go to ip:8080 again
but nothing is appear. It seem like a browser is loading the page all the time.
Do you know how to fix this?
Thank you in advance.
How to save and exit?
If localhost:8080 get blanck page…
This could be due to the firewall on the Droplet. LAMP one clicks have all ports except 22 80 and 443 blocking for incoming traffic. Can you confirm that the port is opened on the Droplet for port 8080? This command will list your rules:
sudo ufw status
This command will open the port:
sudo ufw allow 8080
For more reading I recommend these documents on UFW:
It all works fine, and I get the tomcat page at http://server_IP_address:8080. I also configured my web app to listen to port 7777 and made a connector in server.xml so that it redirects port 80 to 7777. However, when I go to http://server_IP_address (no port), I still get the apache welcome screen. Going to http://server_IP_address:8080 I get my web app. How can I configure apache so that it goes to tomcat on port 80? I need that to publish my app in my domain.
For some reason I keep getting an error that it took too long to respond.
I typed the url as follows: http://22.214.171.124:8080
I currently have the following in my /etc/default/tomcat7 file:
JAVA_OPTS="-Djava.security.egd=file:/dev/./urandom -Djava.awt.headless=true -Xm$
I looked in catalina.out and I didn’t see any errors. I do get a couple of warnings such as the ones below but I am not sure if that has anything to do with it.:
Apr 14, 2016 12:49:29 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.ClassLoaderFactory validateFile WARNING: Problem with directory [/usr/share/tomcat7/common/classes], exists: [false], isDirectory: [false], canRead: [false] Apr 14, 2016 12:49:29 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.ClassLoaderFactory validateFile WARNING: Problem with directory [/usr/share/tomcat7/common], exists: [false], isDirectory: [false], canRead: [false] Apr 14, 2016 12:49:29 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.ClassLoaderFactory validateFile WARNING: Problem with directory [/usr/share/tomcat7/server/classes], exists: [false], isDirectory: [false], canRead: [false] Apr 14, 2016 12:49:29 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.ClassLoaderFactory validateFile WARNING: Problem with directory [/usr/share/tomcat7/server], exists: [false], isDirectory: [false], canRead: [false] Apr 14, 2016 12:49:29 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.ClassLoaderFactory validateFile WARNING: Problem with directory [/usr/share/tomcat7/shared/classes], exists: [false], isDirectory: [false], canRead: [false] Apr 14, 2016 12:49:29 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.ClassLoaderFactory validateFile WARNING: Problem with directory [/usr/share/tomcat7/shared], exists: [false], isDirectory: [false], canRead: [false]
Here is a link to the entire log file if you are interested: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7zigiddrqblz799/catalina.out?dl=0
where can i find lib folder for tomcat7 … i need to add mysql jar to the lib folder of tomcat … but to my surprise /var/lib/tomcat7 doesnt contain any lib folder to add jars. please help