Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Installation of Tomcat

Tomcat can work in three different ways:

1. As a standalone servlet container. This is useful for debugging and testing, since it also acts a (rather crude) web server. We would not suggest you use it instead of Apache.

2. As an in-process servlet container running inside Apache’s address space. This gives good performance but is poor on scalability when your site’s traffic grows.

3. As an out-of-process servlet container, running in its own address space and communicating with Apache through TCP/IP sockets.

If you decide on 2 or 3, as you probably will, you have to choose which method to use and implement it accordingly.

Consequently, the installation of Tomcat involves two distinct processes: installing Tomcat and adapting Apache to link to it.

Normally we advocate building from source, but in the case of Java it can get tedious, so we decided to install Tomcat from the binary distribution, jakarta.-tomcat-3.3a.tar.gz in our case.

Installation of Tomcat is pretty simple. Having unpacked it, all you have to do is to set the environment variables:

JAVA_HOME  to: /usr/src/java/jdk1.1.8
TOMCAT_HOME  to /usr/src/tomcat/jakarta-tomcat-3.3a

(or the paths on your machine if they are different) and re-log in. Test that everything works by using the command:

ls $TOMCAT_HOME