Tomcat as service.

[Rahul Bhattacharjee]

Hi ,

I noticed an interesting thing with Tomcat or I must have missed something silly. So though of discussing it here.

I want to run tomcat 5.5 as service and it should use a specific JRE , not the one which is being pointed by JAVA_HOME environment varialbe.
To run Tomcat as service , there is a batch file named service.bat in the bin directory .With its help you can install/remove tomcat service instances as windows service.

Question is how do I pass it a different JRE then the one which is pointed by the environment variable JAVA_HOME.

I gone through the code of service.bat and found that it tries to identify the JRE and stores it in a variable PR_JVM , but never seem to use it. I can change the code to point PR_JVM to my jre , but how do I pass it to Tomcat5.exe so that it uses it. In the web also I could not find any good documentation about the usage of tomcat5.exe.

I was suppose to write to the tomcat developers and users mailing list , then though of writing to JR before doing so.

Any pointers would greatly be appreciated .

Thanks,
Rahul Bhattacharjee

[Tim Holloway]

Tomcat uses JAVA_HOME, but it doesn't have to be the same JAVA_HOME that your default environment sets.

Add a file named "SETENV.BAT" to your Tomcat\bin directory and place a "SET JAVA_HOME=" statement in it.

[Rahul Bhattacharjee]

Thanks a lot Tim.

Will your procedure change the JAVA_HOME of the environment itself , or only Tomcat would refer to it while running.

[Tim Holloway]

Each process has its own environment unless the process creator was told to share its environment with the created child. So the JAVA_HOME im your Tomcat process won't be the same JAVA_HOME in any of the other processes.

To see this in action, open 2 command windows. In the first window issue the command "SET X=123". In the second window, issue the command "SET X=456".

Now go back to the first window and issue the command "ECHO %X%".

[Rahul Bhattacharjee]

Thank a lot Tim , its time to do some reading and make hands dirty !!

Regards,
Rahul Bhattacharjee

[Rahul Bhattacharjee]

The setenv.bat thing did not work (or I might have done something wrong , didn't get much time to look deeply into it). However , with a little modification to service.bat , I was able to register tomcat as service ,that used my JRE.

Looks to me like the service looks for the PR_JVM variable for JRE , and if this is set to auto , it uses the one configured with the system.

Thanks,
Rahul Bhattacharjee