CATALINA_BASE question

[David Duran]

Tomcat Version: 5.0.19
I want to be able to keep my $CATALINA_HOME/conf and $CATALINA_HOME/webapps directory separate from the rest of the $CATALINA_HOME stuff. Is the easiest (and safest) way to do this by moving them to their new location and setting the ENV var CATALINA_BASE to point to their new location?

 
c:\tomcat5\shared
          \server
                 \webapps
                         \admin
                         \manager
          \common
          ...
c:\webserver_base\webapps
                 \conf
export CATALINA_HOME=c:\tomcat5
export CATALINA_BASE=c:\webserver_base

I ran a quick test like that on my local machine and it seemed to work. The only thing that caught my attention was that Tomcat was trying to look for the admin and manager webapps under server/webapps relative to $CATALINA_BASE, not $CATALINA_HOME. So I got these exceptions but was able to get rid of them by moving $CATALINA_HOME/server/webapps to $CATALINA_BASE/server/webapps.
Might I add that I'm not using the admin and manager webapps, so I'm wondering if I could ignore the errors altogether.
I just don't know if that's safe to do that. Any insights? Thanks.
[ March 11, 2004: Message edited by: David Duran ]

[Tim Holloway]

First, check to make sure that you understand the difference between CATALINA_HOME and TOMCAT_HOME. You may simply need to point them to different locations.
However, the RPM installation of Tomcat does a different approach, which sounds like what you wanted to do.
Specifically, RPM Tomcat understands the strictures of the LFS standard, which say that executables should go in bin directories, config should go under /etc, work files should go under /var and logfiles go in /var/log.
To honor this useful convention, but still have things where Tomcat can find them, the RPM install creates a set of softlinks. Thus:
ln -s /etc/tomcat4/conf $TOMCAT_HOME/conf
ln -s /var/log/tomcat4 $TOMCAT_HOME/logs
and so forth.
Works very well, and makes the system much more manageable!