Bug#603666: Symlink to /etc/tomcat6 should be provided at /usr/share/tomcat6/conf

[Emmanuel Bourg]

On 07/22/2016 08:51 PM, Markus Koschany wrote:

> I think one issue might be that CATALINA_HOME is in /usr/share/tomcat8
> by default and CATALINA_BASE is in /var/lib/tomcat8. This is a little
> confusing and I wonder if both should point to /var/lib/tomcat8.

I don't think we can do that, because we want to separate the read-only
part of Tomcat (the tomcat libraries and the shell scripts, i.e.
CATALINA_HOME under /usr/share) from the writeable part (user libraries,
webapps, JSP cache, i.e. CATALINA_BASE under /var/lib).


> In any case it would have been useful to know more about the Netbeans
> plugin in question. Which one is exactly? Without this information I
> can't reproduce the issue and I'm not even sure if this is a bug in
> Tomcat 8 or one of Netbeans' external plugins. More information is required.

I don't use Netbeans but I tried IntelliJ IDEA 14 on Jessie with the
tomcat8 package. When configuring the application server in the IDE the
CATALINA_HOME path is requested, and optionally the path to
CATALINA_BASE. Setting CATALINA_HOME to /usr/share/tomcat8 isn't enough
as it doesn't contain the conf directory, and setting CATALINA_BASE to
/var/lib/tomcat8 is necessary.

Side note: when deploying an application to Tomcat from IntelliJ the
CATALINA_BASE files are copied to another directory
(~/.IntelliJIdea14/system/tomcat/<webappname>/). This copy failed
because /etc/tomcat8/tomcat-users.xml is read protected by default. I
had to remove it to start the webapp from IntelliJ.

I also tried configuring Tomcat in IntelliJ after adding a conf symlink
in /usr/share/tomcat8, and this time setting CATALINA_BASE wasn't required.

So regardless of the behavior of the Netbeans plugin I think it's worth
adding the conf symlink since it slightly simplifies the configuration
in IntelliJ.

Emmanuel Bourg