How To Install Apache Tomcat 10 on Ubuntu 20.04

Introduction

Apache Tomcat is a web server and servlet container that is used to serve Java applications. It’s an open source implementation of the Jakarta Servlet, Jakarta Server Pages, and other technologies of the Jakarta EE platform.

In this tutorial, you’ll deploy Apache Tomcat 10 on Ubuntu 20.04. You will install Tomcat 10, set up users and roles, and navigate the admin user interface.

Prerequisites

• One Ubuntu 20.04 server with a sudo non-root user and a firewall, which you can set up by following the Ubuntu 20.04 Initial Server Setup.

Step 1 — Installing Tomcat

In this section, you will set up Tomcat 10 on your server. To begin, you will download its latest version and set up a separate user and appropriate permissions for it. You will also install the Java Development Kit (JDK).

For security purposes, Tomcat should run under a separate, unprivileged user. Run the following command to create a user called tomcat:

sudo useradd -m -d /opt/tomcat -U -s /bin/false tomcat

By supplying /bin/false as the user’s default shell, you ensure that it’s not possible to log in as tomcat.

You’ll now install the JDK. First, update the package manager cache by running:

sudo apt update

Then, install the JDK by running the following command:

sudo apt install default-jdk

Answer y when prompted to continue with the installation.

When the installation finishes, check the version of the available Java installation:

java -version

The output should be similar to this:

Output
openjdk version "11.0.14" 2022-01-18
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 11.0.14+9-Ubuntu-0ubuntu2.20.04)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 11.0.14+9-Ubuntu-0ubuntu2.20.04, mixed mode, sharing)

To install Tomcat, you’ll need the latest Core Linux build for Tomcat 10, which you can get from the downloads page. Select the latest Core Linux build, ending in .tar.gz. At the time of writing, the latest version was 10.0.20.

First, navigate to the /tmp directory:

cd /tmp

Download the archive using wget by running the following command:

wget https://dlcdn.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-10/v10.0.20/bin/apache-tomcat-10.0.20.tar.gz

The wget command downloads resources from the Internet.

Then, extract the archive you downloaded by running:

sudo tar xzvf apache-tomcat-10*tar.gz -C /opt/tomcat --strip-components=1

Since you have already created a user, you can now grant tomcat ownership over the extracted installation by running:

sudo chown -R tomcat:tomcat /opt/tomcat/
sudo chmod -R u+x /opt/tomcat/bin

Both commands update the settings of your tomcat installation. To learn more about these commands and what they do, visit Linux Permissions Basics and How to Use Umask on a VPS.

In this step, you installed the JDK and Tomcat. You also created a separate user for it and set up permissions over Tomcat binaries. You will now configure credentials for accessing your Tomcat instance.

Step 2 — Configuring Admin Users

To gain access to the Manager and Host Manager pages, you’ll define privileged users in Tomcat’s configuration. You will need to remove the IP address restrictions, which disallows all external IP addresses from accessing those pages.

Tomcat users are defined in /opt/tomcat/conf/tomcat-users.xml. Open the file for editing with the following command:

sudo nano /opt/tomcat/conf/tomcat-users.xml

Add the following lines before the ending tag:

<role rolename="manager-gui" />
<user username="manager" password="manager_password" roles="manager-gui" />

<role rolename="admin-gui" />
<user username="admin" password="admin_password" roles="manager-gui,admin-gui" />

Replace highlighted passwords with your own. When you’re done, save and close the file.

Here you define two user roles, manager-gui and admin-gui, which allow access to Manager and Host Manager pages, respectively. You also define two users, manager and admin, with relevant roles.

By default, Tomcat is configured to restrict access to the admin pages, unless the connection comes from the server itself. To access those pages with the users you just defined, you will need to edit config files for those pages.

To remove the restriction for the Manager page, open its config file for editing:

sudo nano /opt/tomcat/webapps/manager/META-INF/context.xml

Comment out the Valve definition, as shown:

...
<Context antiResourceLocking="false" privileged="true" >
  <CookieProcessor className="org.apache.tomcat.util.http.Rfc6265CookieProcessor"
                   sameSiteCookies="strict" />
<!--  <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteAddrValve"
         allow="127\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+|::1|0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1" /> -->
  <Manager sessionAttributeValueClassNameFilter="java\.lang\.(?:Boolean|Integer|Long|Number|String)|org\.apache\.catalina\.filters\.Csr>
</Context>

Save and close the file, then repeat for Host Manager:

sudo nano /opt/tomcat/webapps/host-manager/META-INF/context.xml

You have now defined two users, manager and admin, which you will later use to access restricted parts of the management interface. You’ll now create a systemd service for Tomcat.

Step 3 — Creating a systemd service

The systemd service that you will now create will keep Tomcat quietly running in the background. The systemd service will also restart Tomcat automatically in case of an error or failure.

Tomcat, being a Java application itself, requires the Java runtime to be present, which you installed with the JDK in step 1. Before you create the service, you need to know where Java is located. You can look that up by running the following command:

sudo update-java-alternatives -l

The output will be similar to this:

Output
java-1.11.0-openjdk-amd64      1111       /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.11.0-openjdk-amd64

Note the path where Java resides, listed in the last column. You’ll need the path momentarily to define the service.

You’ll store the tomcat service in a file named tomcat.service, under /etc/systemd/system. Create the file for editing by running:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/tomcat.service

Add the following lines:

[Unit]
Description=Tomcat
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=forking

User=tomcat
Group=tomcat

Environment="JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.11.0-openjdk-amd64"
Environment="JAVA_OPTS=-Djava.security.egd=file:///dev/urandom"
Environment="CATALINA_BASE=/opt/tomcat"
Environment="CATALINA_HOME=/opt/tomcat"
Environment="CATALINA_PID=/opt/tomcat/temp/tomcat.pid"
Environment="CATALINA_OPTS=-Xms512M -Xmx1024M -server -XX:+UseParallelGC"

ExecStart=/opt/tomcat/bin/startup.sh
ExecStop=/opt/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh

RestartSec=10
Restart=always

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Modify the highlighted value of JAVA_HOME if it differs from the one you noted previously.

Here, you define a service that will run Tomcat by executing the startup and shutdown scripts it provides. You also set a few environment variables to define its home directory (which is /opt/tomcat as before) and limit the amount of memory that the Java VM can allocate (in CATALINA_OPTS). Upon failure, the Tomcat service will restart automatically.

When you’re done, save and close the file.

Reload the systemd daemon so that it becomes aware of the new service:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

You can then start the Tomcat service by typing:

sudo systemctl start tomcat

Then, look at its status to confirm that it started successfully:

sudo systemctl status tomcat

The output will look like this:

Output
● tomcat.service - Tomcat
     Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/tomcat.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Fri 2022-03-11 14:37:10 UTC; 2s ago
    Process: 4845 ExecStart=/opt/tomcat/bin/startup.sh (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
   Main PID: 4860 (java)
      Tasks: 15 (limit: 1132)
     Memory: 90.1M
     CGroup: /system.slice/tomcat.service
             └─4860 /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.11.0-openjdk-amd64/bin/java -Djava.util.logging.config.file=/opt/tomcat/conf/logging.properties ...

Press q to exit the command.

To enable Tomcat starting up with the system, run the following command:

sudo systemctl enable tomcat

In this step, you identified where Java resides and enabled systemd to run Tomcat in the background. You’ll now access Tomcat through your web browser.

Step 4 — Accessing the Web Interface

Now that the Tomcat service is running, you can configure the firewall to allow connections to Tomcat. Then, you will be able to access its web interface.

Tomcat uses port 8080 to accept HTTP requests. Run the following command to allow traffic to that port:

sudo ufw allow 8080

In your browser, you can now access Tomcat by navigating to the IP address of your server:

http://your_server_ip:8080

You’ll see the default Tomcat welcome page:

You’ve now verified that the Tomcat service is working.

Press on the Manager App button on the right. You’ll be prompted to enter the account credentials that you defined in a previous step.

You should see a page that looks like this:

The Web Application Manager is used to manage your Java applications. You can start, stop, reload, deploy, and undeploy them from here. You can also run some diagnostics on your apps (for example, to find memory leaks). Information about your server is available at the very bottom of this page.

Now, take a look at the Host Manager, accessible by pressing its button on the main page:

Here, you can add virtual hosts to serve your applications from. Keep in mind that this page is not accessible by users who don’t have the admin-gui role assigned, such as manager.

Conclusion

You installed Tomcat 10 on your Ubuntu 20.04 server and configured it to be accessible remotely with management accounts. You can now use it to deploy your Java applications, based on Jakarta EE technologies. You can learn more about Java apps by visiting the official docs.

Currently, your Tomcat installation is functional, but its traffic is not encrypted. This means that all data, including sensitive items like passwords, are sent in plain text that can be intercepted and read by other parties on the internet. To prevent this from happening, you can add a domain name to your server and install a TLS certificate on it with this tutorial on securing Tomcat 10 with Apache or Nginx. For more on encryption, see An Introduction to Let’s Encrypt. To add a domain to a DigitalOcean Droplet, follow this guide on How To Add Domains.