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Installing Tomcat 6 on CentOS 5.5 Tutorial

Apache Tomcat is an open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. The Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages specifications are developed under the Java Community Process.

So before we start just some general house keeping. The base CentOS 5.5 server hostname and IP address that we’ll be using in this tutorial:

  • www.how2centos.com (IP 10.0.0.3)

The Tomcat 6 Server will eventually be available on http://www.how2centos.com:8080

The assumption, for this Tomcat 6 and CentOS 5.5 tutorial, is that you are running as root and have a medium understanding of the software required but if you’re Awesome that’s good enough.

Install Yum Priorities

For a brief overview on and how to configure Yum Priorities you can follow the instructions outlined in our Install YUM Priorities on CentOS tutorial.

# yum install yum-priorities

Install the EPEL i386 YUM Repository

# rpm -Uvh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

Install the RPMForge i386 YUM Repository

# rpm -Uvh http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.i386.rpm

Install the JPackage Project repository

# cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
# wget http://jpackage.org/jpackage50.repo

Install Java

We just used the openjdk that available via the repositories but if you prefer Sun JDK the download it and install it.

yum install java

Install Tomcat6

# yum install tomcat6 tomcat6-webapps tomcat6-admin-webapps

Add in JAVA_HOME under the CATALINA_TMPDIR reference

# vi /usr/share/tomcat6/conf/tomcat6.conf
JAVA_HOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.6.0-openjdk-1.6.0.0/"

Start the Tomcat 6 service

# service tomcat6 start

Browser to your newly installed Tomcat6 Server (remember port 8080)

http://www.how2centos.com:8080