tomcat - CATALINA BASE and CATALINA HOME variables

Question

I have multiple instances of tomcat 6 running on the same server  Linux  and it works as expected  I am trying to find out what the standard practice is with regards to setting the CATALINA HOME and CATALINA BASE variables   In my tomcat installation  I have setup CATALINA HOME to point to a  common  folder  say  tomcat6  and the CATALINA BASE variable varies depending on the instance name  say  tomcat instance1   tomcat instance2   My question is this      Do I really need two variables  Or Can I just have one CATALINA HOME and do away with CATALINA BASE  or vice-versa

User · Answer

Pointing CATALINA BASE to a different directory from CATALINA HOME allows you to separate the configuration directory from the binaries directory   By default  CATALINA BASE  configurations  and CATALINA HOME  binaries  point to the same folder  but separating the configurations from the binaries can help you to run multiple instances of Tomcat side by side without duplicating the binaries   It is also useful when you want to update the binaries  without modifying  or needing to backup restore your configuration files for Tomcat   Update 2018  There is an easier way to set CATALINA BASE now with the makebase utility   I have posted a tutorial that covers this subject at http   blog rasia io blog how-to-easily-setup-lucee-in-tomcat html along with a video tutorial at https   youtu be nuugoG5c-7M  Original answer continued below  To take advantage of this feature  simply create the config directory and point to it with the CATALINA BASE environment variable   You will have to put some files in that directory    Copy the conf directory from the original Tomcat installation directory  including its contents  and ensure that Tomcat has read permissions to it   Edit the configuration files according to your needs  Create a logs directory if conf logging properties points to   catalina base  logs  and ensure that Tomcat has read write permissions to it  Create a temp directory if you are not overriding the default of  CATALINA TMPDIR which points to   CATALINA BASE  temp  and ensure that Tomcat has write permissions to it  Create a work directory which defaults to   CATALINA BASE  work  and ensure that Tomcat has write permissions to it

User · Answer

CATALINA HOME vs CATALINA BASE  If you re running multiple instances  then you need both variables  otherwise only CATALINA HOME   In other words  CATALINA HOME is required and CATALINA BASE is optional   CATALINA HOME represents the root of your Tomcat installation      Optionally  Tomcat may be configured for multiple instances by defining  CATALINA BASE for each instance  If multiple instances are not configured   CATALINA BASE is the same as  CATALINA HOME    See  Apache Tomcat 7 - Introduction  Running with separate CATALINA HOME and CATALINA BASE is  documented in RUNNING txt which say      The CATALINA HOME and CATALINA BASE environment variables are used to   specify the location of Apache Tomcat and the location of its active   configuration  respectively       You cannot configure CATALINA HOME and CATALINA BASE variables in the   setenv script  because they are used to find that file    For example       4 1  Tomcat can be started by executing one of the following   commands      CATALINA HOME  bin startup bat          Windows      CATALINA HOME bin startup sh            Unix        or     CATALINA HOME  bin catalina bat start   Windows      CATALINA HOME bin catalina sh start     Unix     Multiple Tomcat Instances     In many circumstances  it is desirable to have a single copy of a   Tomcat binary distribution shared among multiple users on the same   server   To make this possible  you can set the CATALINA BASE   environment variable to the directory that contains the files for your    personal  Tomcat instance       When running with a separate CATALINA HOME and CATALINA BASE  the   files and directories are split as following       In CATALINA BASE          bin - Only  setenv sh   nix  or setenv bat  Windows   tomcat-juli jar   conf - Server configuration files  including server xml    lib  - Libraries and classes  as explained below   logs - Log and output files   webapps - Automatically loaded web applications   work - Temporary working directories for web applications   temp - Directory used by the JVM for temporary files           In CATALINA HOME          bin  - Startup and shutdown scripts   lib  - Libraries and classes  as explained below   endorsed - Libraries that override standard  Endorsed Standards   By default it s absent       How to check  The easiest way to check what s your CATALINA BASE and CATALINA HOME is by running startup sh  for example      usr share tomcat7 bin startup sh Using CATALINA BASE     usr share tomcat7 Using CATALINA HOME     usr share tomcat7   You may also check where the Tomcat files are installed  by dpkg tool as below  Debian Ubuntu    dpkg -L tomcat7-common

User · Answer

CATALINA BASE is optional   However  in the following scenarios it helps to setup CATALINA BASE that is separate from CATALINA HOME    When more than 1 instances of tomcat are running on same host   This helps have only 1 runtime of tomcat installation  with multiple CATALINA BASE server configurations running on separate ports  If any patching  or version upgrade needs be  only 1 installation changes required  or need to be tested verified signed-off   Separation of concern  Single responsibility    Tomcat runtime is standard and does not change during every release process  i e  Tomcat binaries Release process may add more stuff as webapplication  webapps folder   environment configuration  conf directory   logs temp work directory

User · Answer

I can t say I know the best practice  but here s my perspective   Are you using these variables for anything   Personally  I haven t needed to change neither  on Linux nor Windows  in environments varying from development to production  Unless you are doing something particular that relies on them  chances are you could leave them alone   catalina sh sets the variables that Tomcat needs to work out of the box  It also says that CATALINA BASE is optional       CATALINA HOME   May point at your Catalina  build  directory        CATALINA BASE    Optional  Base directory for resolving dynamic portions                     of a Catalina installation   If not present  resolves to                     the same directory that CATALINA HOME points to    I m pretty sure you ll find out whether or not your setup works when you start your server

User · Answer

If you are running multiple instances of Tomcat on a single host you should set CATALINA BASE to be equal to the     tomcat instance1 or     tomcat instance2 directory as appropriate for each instance and the CATALINA HOME environment variable to the common Tomcat installation whose files will be shared between the two instances   The CATALINA BASE environment is optional if you are running a single Tomcat instance on the host and will default to CATALINA HOME in that case  If you are running multiple instances as you are it should be provided   There is a pretty good description of this setup in the RUNNING txt file in the root of the Apache Tomcat distribution under the heading Advanced Configuration - Multiple Tomcat Instances

User · Answer

That is the parent folder of bin which contains tomcat exe file   CATALINA HOME  C  Program Files Apache Software Foundation Tomcat 6 0    CATALINA BASE is the same as CATALINA HOME

[java] tomcat - CATALINA_BASE and CATALINA_HOME variables

Update 2018

Original answer continued below

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