Procedure 2.14. Running Tomcat on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

1. After extracting the zip file, check to see if a user called tomcat exists on the system by running the following command:

   id tomcat

2. If the user does not exist, use the following command to add it:

   groupadd -g 91 -r tomcat
   useradd -c "Tomcat" -u 91 -g tomcat -s /bin/sh -r tomcat

3. If the tomcat user will be running Tomcat, change the ownership of the tomcat directories.
   1. Use the following command for Tomcat 6:

      chown -R tomcat:tomcat tomcat6

      • Use the following command for Tomcat 7:

        chown -R tomcat:tomcat tomcat7

4. Test that the tomcat user has execution permission to the tomcat install path.
5. Set the JAVA_HOME variable. Use one of the following approaches to set this variable.
   1. Provide the value for JAVA_HOME externally by setting the value prior to starting Tomcat.
      • Set the value for JAVA_HOME in the setenv.sh file. In Tomcat 6, this file is available at tomcat6/bin/ and in Tomcat 7, this file is available at tomcat7/bin/. This value is loaded from catalina.sh and overrides all other set values for JAVA_HOME.