Developer-friendly Tomcat 6.0 lands in Intrepid

Tomcat 6.0 will be available in Ubuntu 8.10 and you can enjoy Apache Tomcat 6.0.18 right now in the Intrepid Ibex development version. It has been packaged so that it can be used in two ways:

As a unique system-wide instance

This is the classic case of a Tomcat server that is started at boot by the init script and runs under the tomcat6 user. The tomcat6 package should be installed to cover such a scenario:

$ sudo apt-get install tomcat6

NB: This currently installs way too much dependencies, especially on a server install. Work is currently done to reduce that to an acceptable number.

Point a browser to the default start page at http://localhost:8080 to check that everything is alright and start deploying webapps.

Ready to be used webapps provided by Tomcat are also available from the archive:

$ sudo apt-get install tomcat6-examples tomcat6-docs tomcat6-admin

In developer-oriented private instances

The other use case is a development server where multiple developers can run their own Tomcat instances under their user account. The system administrator should install the tomcat6-user package:

$ sudo apt-get install tomcat6-user

Developers can then create private instances with a single command:

$ tomcat6-instance-create my-own-tomcat6

This will setup a private Tomcat 6.0 instance in a my-own-tomcat6/ directory using the system-installed libraries and binaries. Per-instance customization can be done in my-own-tomcat6/conf/server.xml (eg changing default ports to avoid conflicts). webapps are deployed in my-own-tomcat6/webapps/. Starting and stoping the server is done with the following commands:

$ my-own-tomcat6/bin/startup.sh
$ my-own-tomcat6/bin/shutdown.sh

This is still relatively new so testing and suggesting improvements through the Tomcat6 bugs page in Launchpad is welcome. Let’s all make tomcat6 rock in Intrepid !