Sample Tomcat7 setup

There are a few steps that I generally take to setup a new Tomcat server instance, this enables the following:

• The manager console
• HTTP compression
• UTF-8 encoding

Steps:

1. tomcat-users.xml – add to bottom:
   
<role rolename="manager-gui"/>
<user username="tomcat" password="s3cr3t" roles="manager-gui"/>


2. server.xml – add compression and URIEncoding, change port if desired:
   
<Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1"
connectionTimeout="20000"
redirectPort="8443" compression="on" URIEncoding="UTF-8" />


3. server.xml – relocate webapps by adding ../ to appBase
   
<Host name="localhost" appBase="../webapps"
unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true">


4. Restart your server, on Ubuntu use:

   sudo service tomcat7 restart