Tomcat can be run as a daemon using the jsvc tool from the
commons-daemon project. Source tarballs for jsvc are included with the
Tomcat binaries, and need to be compiled. Building jsvc requires
a C ANSI compiler (such as GCC), GNU Autoconf, and a JDK.
Before running the script, the JAVA_HOME environment
variable should be set to the base path of the JDK. Alternately, when
calling the ./configure script, the path of the JDK may
be specified using the --with-java parameter, such as
./configure --with-java=/usr/java.
Using the following commands should result in a compiled jsvc binary,
located in the $CATALINA_HOME/bin folder. This assumes
that GNU TAR is used, and that CATALINA_HOME is an
environment variable pointing to the base path of the Tomcat
installation.
Please note that you should use the GNU make (gmake) instead of
the native BSD make on FreeBSD systems.
cd $CATALINA_HOME/bin
tar xvfz commons-daemon-native.tar.gz
cd commons-daemon-1.1.x-native-src/unix
./configure
make
cp jsvc ../..
cd ../..
Tomcat can then be run as a daemon using the following commands.
CATALINA_BASE=$CATALINA_HOME
cd $CATALINA_HOME
./bin/jsvc \
-classpath $CATALINA_HOME/bin/bootstrap.jar:$CATALINA_HOME/bin/tomcat-juli.jar \
-outfile $CATALINA_BASE/logs/catalina.out \
-errfile $CATALINA_BASE/logs/catalina.err \
-Dcatalina.home=$CATALINA_HOME \
-Dcatalina.base=$CATALINA_BASE \
-Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager \
-Djava.util.logging.config.file=$CATALINA_BASE/conf/logging.properties \
org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap
When runnong on Java 9 you will need to additionally specify the
following when starting jsvc to avoid warnings on shutdown.
...
--add-opens=java.base/java.lang=ALL-UNNAMED \
--add-opens=java.base/java.io=ALL-UNNAMED \
--add-opens=java.rmi/sun.rmi.transport=ALL-UNNAMED \
...
You may also need to specify -jvm server if the JVM defaults
to using a server VM rather than a client VM. This has been observed on
OSX.
jsvc has other useful parameters, such as -user which
causes it to switch to another user after the daemon initialization is
complete. This allows, for example, running Tomcat as a non privileged
user while still being able to use privileged ports. Note that if you
use this option and start Tomcat as root, you'll need to disable the
org.apache.catalina.security.SecurityListener check that
prevents Tomcat starting when running as root.
jsvc --help will return the full jsvc usage
information. In particular, the -debug option is useful
to debug issues running jsvc.
The file $CATALINA_HOME/bin/daemon.sh can be used as a
template for starting Tomcat automatically at boot time from
/etc/init.d with jsvc.
Note that the Commons-Daemon JAR file must be on your runtime classpath
to run Tomcat in this manner. The Commons-Daemon JAR file is in the
Class-Path entry of the bootstrap.jar manifest, but if you get a
ClassNotFoundException or a NoClassDefFoundError for a Commons-Daemon
class, add the Commons-Daemon JAR to the -cp argument when launching
jsvc.
