Tomcat: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2. Configuring Tomcat

Once Tomcat is up and running, you will want to keep an eye on it, to help it along occasionally. Troubleshooting application servers can be intimidating. In this chapter, we show you the various places to look for information about your server, how to find out why things aren't working, and give you some examples of common mistakes in setting up and configuring Tomcat. Want to run Tomcat on the default HTTP port 80? We show you some ways of doing that. You will also find some pointers on what JVM startup switch settings you can use. You'll learn how you can manage the web user accounts that Tomcat knows about and how to configure security realms to customize which users can access your Tomcat's web content. We also show you how to configure your Tomcat to open a pool of connections to your database for your webapp to use. Next, we show how to configure Tomcat to use Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs. Finally, we discuss the Tomcat administration web application, a tool for helping you with the task of keeping Tomcat running.

A Word About Using the Apache Web Server

You can use Tomcat as a standalone combination web server and servlet container, or you can use it as an add-on servlet container for a separate web server. Both are common, and each is appropriate in certain situations.

The Tomcat authors have spent quite a bit of time and effort to make Tomcat run efficiently as a standalone web server; as a result, it is easy to set up and run a web ...