Unix Daemon

Tomcat can be run as a daemon using the jsvc tool from the commons-daemon project. Source tarballs for jsvc are included with the Tomcat binaries, and need to be compiled. Building jsvc requires a C ANSI compiler (such as GCC), GNU Autoconf, and a JDK.

Before running the script, the JAVA_HOME environment variable should be set to the base path of the JDK. Alternately, when calling the ./configure script, the path of the JDK may be specified using the –with-javaparameter, such as ./configure –with-java=/usr/java.

Using the following commands should result in a compiled jsvc binary, located in the $CATALINA_HOME/bin folder. This assumes that GNU TAR is used, and that CATALINA_HOME is an environment variable pointing to the base path of the Tomcat installation.

Please note that you should use the GNU make (gmake) instead of the native BSD make on FreeBSD systems.

 

cd $CATALINA_HOME/bin

tar xvfz commons-daemon-native.tar.gz

cd commons-daemon-1.0.x-native-src/unix

./configure

make

cp jsvc ../..

cd ../..

 

Tomcat can then be run as a daemon using the following commands.

CATALINA_BASE=$CATALINA_HOME

 

cd $CATALINA_HOME

./bin/jsvc \

-classpath $CATALINA_HOME/bin/bootstrap.jar:$CATALINA_HOME/bin/tomcat-juli.jar \

-outfile $CATALINA_BASE/logs/catalina.out \

-errfile $CATALINA_BASE/logs/catalina.err \

-Dcatalina.home=$CATALINA_HOME \

-Dcatalina.base=$CATALINA_BASE \

-Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager \

-Djava.util.logging.config.file=$CATALINA_BASE/conf/logging.properties \

org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap

 

You may also need to specify -jvm server if the JVM defaults to using a server VM rather than a client VM. This has been observed on OSX.

jsvc has other useful parameters, such as -user which causes it to switch to another user after the daemon initialization is complete. This allows, for example, running Tomcat as a non privileged user while still being able to use privileged ports. Note that if you use this option and start Tomcat as root, you’ll need to disable theorg.apache.catalina.security.SecurityListener check that prevents Tomcat starting when running as root.

jsvc –help will return the full jsvc usage information. In particular, the -debug option is useful to debug issues running jsvc.

The file $CATALINA_HOME/bin/daemon.sh can be used as a template for starting Tomcat automatically at boot time from /etc/init.d with jsvc. that the Commons-Daemon JAR file must be on your runtime class path to run Tomcat in this manner. The Commons-Daemon JAR file is in the Class-Path entry of the bootstrap.jar manifest, but if you get a Class Not Found Exception or a No Class Def Found Error for a Commons-Daemon class, add the Commons-Daemon JAR to the -cp argument when launching jsvc.