Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Tomcat 6 & Fedora 14 frustrations

More woes trying to set up a server image.  Current pothole (as opposed to speed bump) is being brought to you by Tomcat 6 and Fedora 14. Having just gone through a whole lot of hoop-la getting java installed, I installed Tomcat with this simple command:

root@spin-1-16r tomcat6]# yum install tomcat6


First woe:
My woes began when I tried to start up tomcat how I started it up on Rhel:

[root@spin-1-16r tomcat6]# tomcat6 start
/usr/sbin/tomcat6: line 30: /logs/catalina.out: No such file or directory


What? How is an error happening when I haven't done anything but use the package installer yum to install tomcat? This time, I read my error carefully and decided to look in the file /usr/sbin/tomcat6, line 30 for the offending code which was:

    org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap start >> ${CATALINA_BASE}/logs/catalina.out


Looking through the file, I don't see CATALINA_BASE defined. And then going back to the command prompt, I discover the environment variable CATALINA_BASE isn't defined anywhere:

[root@spin-1-16r webapps]# echo $CATALINA_BASE


More searching and I find that it is defined in /etc/tomcat6/tomcat6.conf and going back to the /usr/sbin/tomcat6 file, I see that the following is commented out:

# Get the tomcat config (use this for environment specific settings)
#if [ -z "${TOMCAT_CFG}" ]; then
#  TOMCAT_CFG="/etc/tomcat6/tomcat6.conf"
#fi
#
#if [ -r "$TOMCAT_CFG" ]; then
#  . $TOMCAT_CFG
#fi


Removing the comments from in front of lines 2-8 and saving solved this first issue.

*EDIT*
Avoid first woe sub-part one:
Remember earlier we went through some troubles to set up Sun's java and even set up some environment variables? We probably want to keep using Sun's java for tomcat. Open up the tomcat config file:
[frog@caffiend ~]# less ~tomcat/conf/tomcat6.conf

At the top of the file, after the comments about what file is for, you should see these lines:
# Where your java installation lives
JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java"

Now I'm not 100% that this will over-write the environment variable previously set, nor do I know whether or not that link will end up at the same location or not....so to be safe, I've commented it out on my server:
# Where your java installation lives
#JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java"

Second woe:
Now the next woe began.  For the purposes of work, the webapp war is dropped into the /usr/share/tomcat6 folder and a symbolic link is created in the webapp folder pointing to the war.  This is done because for our testing purposes, we swap various versions of the war, including snapshots, in and out and our deployment code to push out and configure multiple nodes have a hard link to the URL.  We could always just change the name of the war to match what we have in the URL in our code, but then we would lose the quick at a glance sanity check of which version we are running.  So that is what I did.  And I started up tomcat, but EGADS, the war would NOT inflate and deploy.  Why, oh why?  After much googling on keywords like symbolic link not deploying war tomcat6 fedora14, so on and so forth...and bringing in a second pair of eyes...it hits me like a ton of bricks:

[root@spin-1-16r tomcat6]# ls -l webapps/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root     39 Feb 15 22:10 node-server -> /usr/share/tomcat6/node-server-1.16.war


Do you see it now? It sure took me a while...my sym link did NOT end in .war. And that...is all it took. Changing the sym link and restarting tomcat my directory now looks like:

[root@spin-1-16r webapps]# ls -l
total 8
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Feb 15 23:52 logs
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Feb 15 23:52 node-server
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root   39 Feb 15 23:52 node-server.war -> /usr/share/tomcat6/node-server-1.16.war


And thus ends my woes. It looks so simple and duh all summed up here, but man, was it hard to see for me.

5 comments:

  1. Thank you for this article. This also works on Fedora 16 (why shouldn't it, right?); it saved me a deal of frustration.

    ReplyDelete
  2. sudo service tomcat6 start

    Solves problem with privileges and missing configuration for me

    ReplyDelete
  3. Jon: Your welcome. :) Glad I could help.

    castpell: I'll have to give that a try next time, thanks for the tip :).

    ReplyDelete
  4. Uncommenting the If statement did the trick for me. thanks!

    ReplyDelete