The Servlet Container

Installing Apache Tomcat

Linux/Unix Installation

1. Download Apache Tomcat 6.x

2. Untar the package as follows:

tar -xvf apache-tomcat-6.0.26.tar.gz

3.Rename your install to something more meaningful:

mv apache-tomcat-6.0.26 uportal-tomcat

4.Set your environment variables:

export JAVA_HOME=/path/to/your/java
export TOMCAT_HOME=/path/to/your/tomcat

5.Test your Tomcat installation

a. First, start Tomcat

TOMCAT_HOME/bin/startup.sh

b. Go to http://localhost:8080/

You should see the Apache Tomcat Welcome screen

c. Shutdown Tomcat

TOMCAT_HOME/bin/shutdown.sh

Windows Installation

1. Download Apache Tomcat 6.x for Windows

2. Unzip the download into a suitable directory. For example, you may unzip the file into the C:\ directory. This will create a directory like C:\apache-tomcat-6.x containing your Tomcat files.

3. You will need to create two environment variables CATALINA_HOME and JAVA_HOME

 CATALINA_HOME : C:\apache-tomcat-6.x
 JAVA_HOME : C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.x

For Windows (different versions may vary) you can create these environment variables by doing the following: right-click 'My Computer' select properties and then the Advanced tab. Then click Environment Variables and under System variables click New. From here, you can enter the name and value for CATALINA_HOME and again for JAVA_HOME if it's not already created.

4. Start Tomcat. Try starting up Tomcat by running the C:\apache-tomcat-6.x\bin\startup.bat batch file. Point your browser to http://localhost:8080 and you should see the default Tomcat home page (see above image). To shutdown the server run C:\apache-tomcat-6.x\bin\shutdown.bat batch file.

Further Tomcat Configurations

JVM settings

• Examples of JVM settings
• uPortal Heap Tuning

uPortal Specific Notes

Shared Libraries

uPortal places libraries in CATALINA_BASE/shared/lib The default Tomcat 6.0 download does not enable libraries to be loaded from this directory. To resolve this you must edit CATALINA_BASE/conf/catalina.properties and change the line that begins "shared.loader=" to the following:

shared.loader=${catalina.base}/shared/classes,${catalina.base}/shared/lib/*.jar

Shared Sessions

Jasig portlets, as well as many other popular JSR-168 portlets, rely on the ability to share user session data between the portal web application and portlet applications. To enable this feature in Tomcat, you must add the emptySessionPath="true" parameter to the in-use connector.

<Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1"
    connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443" emptySessionPath="true"/>

GZipping HTML

Browser-side performance may be improved somewhat by GZip-ping downloaded content where appropriate. uPortal 3.2 already GZips CSS and JavaScript. uPortal does not, however, GZip the uPortal page itself.

GZipping of HTML content can be performed via Tomcat. To enable this functionality, set compression="on" in the in-use Tomcat connector, and set the list of compressable mime types. More information about this feature can be found in the Tomcat configuration page.

<Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1"
    connectionTimeout="20000" redirectPort="8443" emptySessionPath="true"
    compression="on" compressableMimeType="text/html,text/xml,text/plain"/>

Example Installations

• Servlet Container Installation/Configuration instructions for Windows OS (Chris Doyle - John Hopkins University)
• CalPoly Tomcat Configurations