Tomcat 6 on Debian Lenny

I need to install Tomcat 6 for a school assignment. I thought the installation process was easy as counting 123, but it turned out to be a few hours long of head scratching. Well, the first start is to setup a few environment variables as required by Tomcat:

CATALINA_BASE=/home/kenno/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.13
CATALINA_HOME=/home/kenno/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.13
export CATALINA_HOME;
export CATALINA_BASE# JAVA_HOME and Path to java, javac
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/j2sdk1.6-sun/bin
export JAVA_HOME;
export PATH=${JAVA_HOME}/bin:${PATH}:.

It can be stored in a setEnv.sh file, and run with source setEnv.sh to load those variables.

Then when I tried to run Tomcat with the following command, there was some error with the BASEDIR:

kenno@kampongcham:~$ $CATALINA_HOME/bin/startup.sh
The BASEDIR environment variable is not defined correctly
This environment variable is needed to run this program

I wasted a few hours trying to search for solutions on Google, and as when I was about to temporarily give up for dinner, I found an unexpected answer from one of the blogs.

“I need to set all the shell scripts in $CATALINA_HOME/bin to be executable”

So let’s fix it:

kenno@kampongcham:~$ cd $CATALINA_HOME/bin
kenno@kampongcham:~/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.13/bin$ chmod +x *.sh

Finally, it’s done. We can now run tomcat without any errors:

kenno@kampongcham:~/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.13/bin$ ./startup.sh
Using CATALINA_BASE:   /home/kenno/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.13
Using CATALINA_HOME:   /home/kenno/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.13
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /home/kenno/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.13/temp
Using JRE_HOME:       /usr/lib/j2sdk1.6-sun/bin

That’s it folks. When you setup Tomcat on your machine, make sure you specify the correct path to all the variables mentioned above.

Thanks to Michael for the solution: Tomcat 6 on OSX