Sub.jam

1. Necessary packages

apt-get install tomcat5.5 tomcat5.5-admin tomcat5.5-webapps

2. Directories

/usr/share/tomcat5.5/
/usr/share/tomcat5.5-webapps/
/etc/tomcat5.5
/var/lib/tomcat5.5
/var/log/tomcat5.5

3. Remember to export JAVA_HOME, for example (put in .bashrc)

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.11/

Launch tomcat5.5 using

sudo /etc/init.d/tomcat5.5 start
sudo /etc/init.d/tomcat5.5 restart

4. Problem: Can't start tomcat5.5 in ubuntu
Here is the solution:

$ cd /usr/share/tomcat5.5/logs 
$ sudo mv catalina.out catalina.out.old
$ sudo touch catalina.out
$ sudo chown tomcat55:nogroup catalina.out 

5. Configuration for using Tomcat Manager (http://localhost:8180/manager/html) and Tomcat Administration (http://localhost:8180/admin).
Edit /usr/share/tomcat5.5/conf/tomcat-users.xml and include the following:

<user username="myname" password="mypassword" roles="manager"/>
<user username="myname" password="mypassword" roles="admin"/>

6. Problem of using Tomcat Administration in Debian
Solution:Add the following to the ‘/etc/tomcat5.5/policy.d/50user.policy’

// to activate the admin-interface
// http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/
// pkg-java-maintainers/2006-November/009749.html
grant codeBase “file:/usr/share/struts1.2/struts.jar” {
permission java.security.AllPermission;
};

7. Configure webapps
Recently when Debian upgrades tomcat5.5, all webapps configurations are deleted, only admin and manager apps remain in localhost configuration. This is a really annoying behavior for Debian package update. However, Debian update did notice that I changed tomcat-users.xml, 40webapps.policy and 50users.policy, so I had a chance to keep my old configuration.

For restoring all my webapps,

ln -s /usr/share/tomcat5.5-webapps/anywebapp.xml 
/usr/share/tomcat5.5/conf/Catalina/localhost/anywebapp.xml