Apache Tomcat provides an HTTP server for the Java language. In this article, HOSTVN will guide you to install Tomcat 8 on Ubuntu 18.
Installing Tomcat 8 on Ubuntu 18.04 – Apache Tomcat is a Java Servlet developed by the Apache Software Foundation. Tomcat implements the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages applications from Sun Microsystems, and provides an HTTP server for the Java language to execute commands written in the Java language.
In this post HOSTVN will guide you to install Tomcat 8 on Ubuntu 18.04.
Install Tomcat 8 on Ubuntu 18.04
1. Install OpenJDK
OpenJDK is the default Java platform in Ubuntu 18.04. Installing the OpenJDK package is quite simple with the following command:
sudo apt install default-jdk -y
2. Create Tomcat user
You will need to create a new system user and group with the home directory /opt/tomcat will run the tomcat service:
sudo useradd -m -U -d /opt/tomcat -s /bin/false tomcat
3. Download Tomcat
HOSTVN will use wget to download tomcat and unzip to unzip tomcat. If you don’t have wget installed, unzip install them with the following command:
sudo apt install unzip wget nano -y
Download the latest version of Tomcat 8.5.x from the Tomcat download page. At the time of writing, the latest version is 8.5.55. Before proceeding to the next step, you should check the download page to check for the latest version.
Move to folder /tmp and download the zip file with the following wget command:
cd /tmp wget https://downloads.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-8/v8.5.55/bin/apache-tomcat-8.5.55.zip
Once the download is complete, extract the file and move it to the folder /opt/tomcat:
unzip apache-tomcat-*.zip sudo mkdir -p /opt/tomcat sudo mv apache-tomcat-8.5.55 /opt/tomcat/
For easier management HOSTVN will create a symlink pointing to the tomcat installation directory:
sudo ln -s /opt/tomcat/apache-tomcat-8.5.55 /opt/tomcat/latest
The tomcat user you created earlier needs to have access to the tomcat directory, so you need to change the directory ownership to the tomcat user and group:
sudo chown -R tomcat: /opt/tomcat
Set execute permission for scripts inside directory bin by running the following chmod command:
sudo sh -c 'chmod +x /opt/tomcat/latest/bin/*.sh'
4. Create systemd unit
To be able to run Tomcat as a service, create the file tomcat.service in folder /etc/systemd/system/
sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/tomcat.service
Paste the following in it
[Unit] Description=Tomcat 8.5 servlet container After=network.target [Service] Type=forking User=tomcat Group=tomcat Environment="JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/default-java" Environment="JAVA_OPTS=-Djava.security.egd=file:///dev/urandom" Environment="CATALINA_BASE=/opt/tomcat/latest" Environment="CATALINA_HOME=/opt/tomcat/latest" Environment="CATALINA_PID=/opt/tomcat/latest/temp/tomcat.pid" Environment="CATALINA_OPTS=-Xms512M -Xmx1024M -server -XX:+UseParallelGC" ExecStart=/opt/tomcat/latest/bin/startup.sh ExecStop=/opt/tomcat/latest/bin/shutdown.sh [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target
Press Ctrl + o and press Enter to save files, Ctrl + x to get rid of nano. Then you start Tomcat with the following commands:
sudo systemctl daemon-reload sudo systemctl enable tomcat sudo systemctl start tomcat
You can check the service status with the following command:
sudo systemctl status tomcat
5. Firewall configuration
If your server is protected by the UFW firewall and you want to access the tomcat interface, you will need to open the port 8080. To allow traffic on port 8080use the following command:
sudo ufw allow 8080/tcp
6. Tomcat Web Management Interface Configuration
So we have completed the installation of Tomcat on the Ubuntu server, the next step is to create a user that is allowed to access the web management interface (manager-gui and admin-gui). User is allowed to access admin-gui and manager-gui of Tomcat is defined in the file tomcat-users.xml.
sudo nano /opt/tomcat/latest/conf/tomcat-users.xml
To add users who can access the interface manager-gui and admin-guiyou add the following configuration
Remember instead username and password with the information you want to create
<tomcat-users>
<!--
Comments
-->
<role rolename="admin-gui"/>
<role rolename="manager-gui"/>
<user username="admin" password="admin_password" roles="admin-gui,manager-gui"/>
</tomcat-users>
By default, manager-gui and admin-gui only allow access from localhost, if you want access manager-gui and admin-gui from the outside you can open the following files and make the necessary changes.
If you need access to manager-gui and admin-gui from anywhere, open the following files and comment the following lines:
- /opt/tomcat/latest/webapps/manager/META-INF/context.xml
<Context antiResourceLocking="false" privileged="true" >
<!--
<Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteAddrValve"
allow="127.d+.d+.d+|::1|0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1" />
-->
</Context>
- /opt/tomcat/latest/webapps/host-manager/META-INF/context.xml
<Context antiResourceLocking="false" privileged="true" >
<!--
<Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteAddrValve"
allow="127.d+.d+.d+|::1|0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1" />
-->
</Context>
If you want to allow only specific IPs to be accessed manager-gui and admin-gui, instead of commenting blocks, add your network IP to the list. In this post HOSTVN would for example network IP is 123.45.67.89:
- /opt/tomcat/latest/webapps/manager/META-INF/context.xml
<Context antiResourceLocking="false" privileged="true" >
<Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteAddrValve"
allow="127.d+.d+.d+|::1|0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1|123.45.67.89" />
</Context>
- /opt/tomcat/latest/webapps/host-manager/META-INF/context.xml
<Context antiResourceLocking="false" privileged="true" >
<Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteAddrValve"
allow="127.d+.d+.d+|::1|0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1|123.45.67.89" />
</Context>
The list of allowed IP addresses is a character-separated list |. Restart the Tomcat service for the changes to take effect:
sudo systemctl restart tomcat
7. Check the settings
Open your browser and go to: http://
To access the Tomcat Web Application Manager Console visit the following link: http://
The Tomcat virtual host manager console can be accessed via the link http://
8. Conclusion
In this post HOSTVN I have guided you to install Tomcat 8 on Ubuntu 18.04. You can visit the official Apache Tomcat 8 Documentation page and learn more about the features of Apache Tomcat. If you have any suggestions, you can leave a comment below. In addition, you can see more Instructions for installing LEMP on Ubuntu 18.
