Introduction
Apache Tomcat is the java web server which runs the PhixFlow web application.
This guide covers downloading and installing Tomcat 8 on an Ubuntu Linux server.
Prerequisites
You have installed Ubuntu 16 Linux.
You can login as a non-root user with sudo access.
You have installed Java.
Instructions
Create Tomcat user
For security reasons, you should run tomcat as a non-root user.
This is the tomcat user (in the tomcat group).
We set the shell to /bin/false so that it is not possible to login as tomcat, and set the home directory to /opt/tomcat, the directory under which we will install tomcat.
This user will own all files created by PhixFlow and must be able to read all PhixFlow-specific files and directories.
sudo groupadd tomcat sudo useradd -s /bin/false -g tomcat -d /opt/tomcat tomcat
Download and Install Tomcat
Find the latest version
Go to the tomcat downloads page, find the latest Binary Distributions section, then the Core sub-heading, and copy the tar.gz link.
Download Tomcat
On the linux server, goto the tmp directory then use curl to download from the link that you found above. E.g.
cd /tmp curl -O http://mirror.ox.ac.uk/sites/rsync.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-8/v8.5.11/bin/apache-tomcat-8.5.11.tar.gz
Install Tomcat
Unpack the tomcat tar.gz file into /opt/tomcat and set the file ownership and permissions
sudo mkdir /opt/tomcat cd /opt/tomcat sudo tar xvf /tmp/apache-tomcat-8*tar.gz --strip-components=1