Tomcat Tidbit

Recently I inherited some Tomcat administration duties. Despite my dislike for Java (not the coffee, the application platform) I've been fairly impressed by the stability and performance it has to offer.

The default file directory layout for Tomcat is pretty basic and takes little getting used to. As you could imagine, all the configuration files are stored neatly in the /install/path/conf directory. User permissions are defined by the 'tomcat-users.xml' file:

user name="tomcat" password="tomcat" roles="tomcat,manager"

It comes with a bolt-on manager package which is not bad and can be accessed by:

http://ip.add.of.srv:port/manager

There's also a decent session manager (looks pretty bad, but runs very quickly and has all the session information you need, arrange by webapp) located at:

http://ip.add.of.srv:port/manager/html/sessions?path=/webappname

By default, this particular version that I'm running only allocates 256MB of RAM for Tomcat. In order to change this, we need to update:

/install/path/bin/setenv.sh

#!/bin/sh
# Set these variables for use during Tomcat startup / shutdown

# setenv.sh created by dt2install scripts Tue Mar 8 11:54:24 2011
# Note: You may want to manually merge any setting saved in setenv.sh_3-8-2011_11-54

JAVA_HOME=/usr/java;export JAVA_HOME
CATALINA_OPTS="-Djava.awt.headless=true -server -Xms512m -Xmx512m -Dfile.encoding=utf-8";export CATALINA_OPTS