Starting Tomcat then closing the shell.

[Tony Evans]

Simple question but I cant seem to find the answer on Google. I am starting tomcat on a linux box using catalina.bat jpda run this is great for development.
But now I need to start tomcat, and close the shell I use.

Uisng catalina.bat jpda run if I close the shell it stops the tomcat instance.

Would I be right in thinking I should be using catalina.bat jpda start.

Thanks for any help.

[Tim Holloway]

There's a couple of problems with that statement. First, "jpda" is a debugging option, so you would only use it while testing with a remote debugger.

More importantly, though, you can't use a ".bat" file to run scripts in Linux. Tomcat uses ".sh" files for that.

I don't think any of the script options will do what you want, though. You want to run Tomcat as a dæmon. These days that means you'd usually use the OS systemd resource management subsystem to start and stop Tomcat.

Unfortunately, the systemd file doesn't come with Tomcat, but here's a typical implementation:

https://gist.github.com/drmalex07/e6e99dad070a78d5dab24ff3ae032ed1

[Harlin Seritt]

A few questions for you:

Are you using a GUI like Gnome maybe? or is this from a headless terminal?

How are you opening the shell you're using to run catalina.sh (I have to assume you're using catalina.sh instead of catalina.bat if you're on a Linux server)? Are you calling this from an IDE perhaps?

What is the command exactly you're using to start catalina?

On a Linux system you can use something called nohup to run something in the background and close the tty you're using to call it but that isn't always necessary.

[Tim Holloway]

Harlin Seritt wrote:
On a Linux system you can use something called nohup to run something in the background and close the tty you're using to call it but that isn't always necessary.

The screen utility is also good for stuff like that. I use it to run the Hercules mainframe emulator, for example.

But as a general rule, if you're planning to run Tomcat as an ongoing service, the best way to run it is as a system service daemon.