X.U Java Chronicle

Install Tomcat 5.x

I haven't used tomcat for a long time because ever since, I've either used BEA Weblogic  or Websphere, just never went back to tomcat.

My new job is here, so I thought it's time to play with a few things at home, natually, tomcat is my top choice and so, let me document down how I get it installed.

JDK 1.5 Installation

1. First,  jdk 1.5 is required. To download it, please visit JDK 1.5 Resource (which is called 5.0) a bit confusing...  I chosed  JDK5.0 update 11 (just the jre and other core utilies since i don't need NetBeans IDE nor web services support at this minute)

2.  Install the jdk1.5 setup.exe, the next step is setup enviornment variable "JAVA_HOME" and have your path set to "$InstalledDirectory/bin/" so your command line recongizes commands like "java" or "javac".

To set the enviornment variables

a) right click on "my computer" on your desktop.
b) chose "Advanced" tab and click "Enviroment Variables" button on the buttom.
c) click "New" button on the bottom of "System Varaibles",  add a variable name "JAVA_HOME" and point it to where you installed your jdk.
d) from the exisiting System variables, select the "Path" variables, in the beginngin, add the directory where you installed your jdk/bin/ , and make sure you have a semicolon at the end.

and that's all there is to the JDK part of setup, let's move on to Tomcat.

Tomcat Installation

First, go to the Apache Tomcat project,

1. Download the "Core" package.
2. Download the "Administration Web Application" package (When I was using it awhile back, I remember the admin application was included by default, I guess it's changed since then..I'm definilty getting old, hehe)
3. Unzip the "core" package into a directory of your choice.
4. Open up the "Administration Web Application" temporarily in your zip utility, you'll see two folders /server and /conf.   copy the admin folder inside /server/webapps/ into step 3)'s /server/webapps.
5.  Similar steps for /conf and copy the admin.xml  into step 3's /conf/Catalina/localhost/
6.  Now, let's go to the directory of step 3), find /conf/catalina/tomcat-users.xml, add two roles
"manager" and "admin"
and another user with these two roles, say "tester" like the following


  <role rolename="manager"/>
  <role rolename="admin"/>

  <user username="tester" password="changeme" roles="admin,manager"/>
7. Let's start the tomcat web server. Open up your command prompt Start->Run->type cmd
8. switch to the directory in step 3 (cd  blah/blah)
9. cd into bin directory
10. Type catalina run

You shall see the default Tomcat page and from there, you can log into the "web administration tool".

I'll talk about how to configure the equaivlent of "virtual directories" of IIS in tomcat in a later time.

Happy Tomcat.