Setup Tomcat as Staging Environment

Updated May 15, 2020 ·

Overview

Apache Tomcat can serve as an effective staging environment for testing applications before production. By deploying to Tomcat, teams can evaluate application functionality in a controlled setting, ensuring it meets quality standards before full release.

• Supports testing with similar configurations as the production environment.
• Allows for validation of deployment processes and troubleshooting.
• Enables integration testing with other services in a near-production setting.

Lab Environment

In this lab, we have the following Linux machines, and we will use a local computer (laptop) to connect to them.

• jenkinsmaster

You can choose to set up a virtual machine on your computer or create instances in the cloud. In this case, EC2 instances are used.

Note that for this lab, we'll only be using jenkinsmaster and you can disregard the other tstsvrs and jenkinsslave1 for now.

Install Tomcat

For labbing purpose, we'll just install the Tomcat in the same Jenkins server. Currently, our Jenkins server is on a RHEL 8 Machine. Following this links:

• How to Install Apache Tomcat in RHEL 8
• Install Apache Tomcat 9 on CentOS 8 / RHEL 8

Note that Java must first be installed. To check:

$ java --version

openjdk 11.0.14 2022-01-18 LTS
OpenJDK Runtime Environment 18.9 (build 11.0.14+9-LTS)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM 18.9 (build 11.0.14+9-LTS, mixed mode, sharing)

Once done, install tomcat on the Jenkins server. We have an option to follow the steps from the two links above but since I wanted to make sure I can re-run this lab multiple times without the need to input any commands, I created an Ansible playbook

install-tomcat.yml

# installs tomcat - needed for Jenkins lab
---

- name: Install tomcat
  hosts: jenkins
  become: true
  tasks:

    - name: Ensure group "tomcat" exists
      ansible.builtin.group:
        name: tomcat
        state: present
        system: true

    - name: Add user+group for Tomcat
      ansible.builtin.user:
        name: tomcat
        shell: /bin/false
        groups: tomcat
        home: /usr/local/tomcatlink
        state: present   

    - name: Get latest version of Tomcat and set in variable
      set_fact:
        ver: 9.0.58

    - name: Download files for Tomcat
      get_url:
        url: https://archive.apache.org/dist/tomcat/tomcat-9/v{{ ver }}/bin/apache-tomcat-{{ ver }}.tar.gz
        dest: /usr/local

    - name: Extract downloaded archive for Tomcat
      ansible.builtin.unarchive:
        src: /usr/local/apache-tomcat-{{ ver }}.tar.gz
        dest: /usr/local
        remote_src: yes    
        owner: tomcat 
        group: tomcat          

    - name: Create symbolic link for Tomcat - Getting error so create dir dirst
      ansible.builtin.file:
        src: /usr/local/apache-tomcat-{{ ver }}
        name:  /usr/local/tomcatlink
        state: directory
        # force: yes     

    - name: Empty dir
      ansible.builtin.file:
        src: /usr/local/apache-tomcat-{{ ver }}
        name: /usr/local/tomcatlink
        state: absent
        # force: yes  

    - name: Create symbolic link for Tomcat
      ansible.builtin.file:
        src: /usr/local/apache-tomcat-{{ ver }}
        name: /usr/local/tomcatlink
        state: link  
        owner: tomcat 
        group: tomcat
        force: yes     

    - name: Set ownership of symbolic link for Tomcat
      ansible.builtin.file:
        name: /usr/local/tomcatlink
        state: link  
        owner: tomcat 
        group: tomcat

    - name: Create /etc/systemd/system/tomcat.service
      copy:
        dest: "/etc/systemd/system/tomcat.service"
        content: |
          [Unit]
          Description=Apache Tomcat Server
          After=syslog.target network.target

          [Service]
          Type=forking
          User=tomcat
          Group=tomcat

          Environment=CATALINA_PID=/usr/local/tomcatlink/temp/tomcat.pid
          Environment=CATALINA_HOME=/usr/local/tomcatlink
          Environment=CATALINA_BASE=/usr/local/tomcatlink

          ExecStart=/usr/local/tomcatlink/bin/catalina.sh start
          ExecStop=/usr/local/tomcatlink/bin/catalina.sh stop

          RestartSec=10
          Restart=always
          [Install]
          WantedBy=multi-user.target

    - name: Change tomcat port to use 8081
      ansible.builtin.replace:
        path: /usr/local/apache-tomcat-{{ ver }}/conf/server.xml
        regexp: '(\s+)<Connector port="8080"(\s+.*)'
        replace: '\1<Connector port="8081"\2'        

    # Uncomment play below if you have firewalld
    # - name: FirewallD rules
    #   firewalld:
    #     permanent: yes
    #     immediate: yes
    #     port: 8081/tcp
    #     zone: public
    #     state: enabled

    - name: Configure users on tomcat-users.xml
      ansible.builtin.lineinfile:
        path: /usr/local/tomcatlink/conf/tomcat-users.xml
        insertbefore: "^</tomcat-users>"
        line: |
          <role rolename="admin-gui"/>
          <role rolename="manager-gui"/>
          <user username="tomcat1" password="tomcat1993" roles="admin-gui,manager-gui,manager-script"/>

    - name: Enable Remote Access to Tomcat Manager 
      ansible.builtin.lineinfile:
        path: /usr/local/apache-tomcat-{{ ver }}/webapps/manager/META-INF/context.xml
        regexp: 'allow="127\.\d+\.\d\+\.\d\+|::1|0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1" />'
        line: '         allow="127\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+|::1|0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 |.*" />'        
        state: present

    - name: Enable Remote Access to Tomcat Host-manager 
      ansible.builtin.lineinfile:
        path: /usr/local/apache-tomcat-{{ ver }}/webapps/host-manager/META-INF/context.xml
        regexp: 'allow="127\.\d+\.\d\+\.\d\+|::1|0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1" />'
        line: '         allow="127\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+|::1|0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 |.*" />'        
        state: present

    - name: Force systemd to reread configs
      systemd:
        daemon_reload: yes

    - name: Ensures Tomcat is started
      systemd:
        name: tomcat
        enabled: yes
        state: started