Tomcat on FC4

These are some working notes on the configuration of Apache Tomcat on Fedora Core 4.

Application structure

/usr/share/tomcat5

This is the path that the environment variable CATALINA_HOME refers to, which is normally the primary installation directory. On Fedora Core 4, most of the directories it contains are symbolic links to other locations, as follows:

common  -> /var/lib/tomcat5/common
conf    -> /etc/tomcat5
logs    -> /var/log/tomcat5
server  -> /var/lib/tomcat5/server
shared  -> /var/lib/tomcat5/shared
temp    -> /var/cache/tomcat5/temp
webapps -> /var/lib/tomcat5/webapps
work    -> /var/cache/tomcat5/work

/etc/tomcat5

This is the location of the Tomcat server configuration, including server.xml. On Fedora Core 4, it also contains a tomcat5.conf file that configures the service under which Tomcat runs.

The key configuration files are owned by root.

/var/lib/tomcat5/webapps

This directory contains the example applications distributed with Tomcat, which can be used to test the successful installation of the container. The tomcat-docs directory holds the system and source documentation.

/var/lib/tomcat5/common

The classes in this common library path are available to all applications and the Tomcat container itself.

The classes subdirectory is empty, endorsed has symbolic links to the JAXP parser implementation and Apache Commons APIs packaged with Fedora Core 4.

The lib directory contains the fundamental supporting classes for the Tomcat system itself, including the Servlet API, the Jasper Java Server Pages (JSP) compiler and runtime, plus JavaMail providers and object pooling systems.

/var/lib/tomcat5/shared

This shared path contains resource that are available to all Web applications but not the Tomcat container itself and its subdirectories are empty.

/var/lib/tomcat5/server

This directory contains the "Catalina" system classes, in the lib subdirectory. The classes subdirectory is actually empty, and the webapps has restricted access; it contains the admin and manager applications.