Setting up a Tomcat in your AMI

I love Java and Object Oriented Paradigm, and I was looking for an option to develop Java apps in the cloud in a cheap way. The cheaper, light and non-restrictive way to do this is installing Tomcat in an AmazonWS Linux-AMI. You can do great applications in Tomcat with Spring/JPA/JSF2, but this architecture deserves another post.

Well, I want to show you how to configure Tomcat to deploy web applications in a basic-AMI (It’s free the first year):

Configuring memory heap
Provide gzip compression for the web contents
Two ways to redirect to port 80
And, if you use maven, deploying remotely with cargo

Installation and memory heap

Install with yum tomcat 6.0.32:

sudo yum install tomcat*

Preparing console access:

sudo vi /etc/tomcat6/tomcat-users.xml

		<user name="tomcat" password="youpasshere" roles="manager"></user>

Increasing the memory configuration:

sudo vi /etc/tomcat6/tomcat6.conf

JAVA_OPTS=" -Xmx512M -XX:MaxPermSize=128M"

GZIP compression

This is really easy, but useful:

sudo vi /etc/tomcat6/server.xml

Add at the Connector tag the attribute compression=”force”

Redirecting to port 80

The easy way with iptables, rerouting the port:

sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8080

sudo iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8080

The difficult way, installing Mod_JK:

wget http://dev.centos.org/centos/5/testing/i386/RPMS/mod_jk-ap20-1.2.28-2.el5.centos.i386.rpm

sudo rpm -ivh mod_jk-ap20-1.2.28-2.el5.centos.i386.rpm

vi /etc/httpd/workers.properties

You must write:

		workers.tomcat_home=/usr/share/tomcat6
		ps=/
		worker.list=ajp13
		worker.ajp13.port=8009
 		worker.ajp13.host=localhost
		worker.ajp13.type=ajp13 #Mod_jk

And in apache config write:

vi /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

    #Mod_jk
    LoadModule jk_module /etc/httpd/modules/mod_jk.so
 
    # Where to find workers.properties
    JkWorkersFile /etc/httpd/workers.properties
 
    # Where to put jk logs
    JkLogFile /var/log/httpd/mod_jk.log
 
    # Set the jk log level [debug/error/info]
    JkLogLevel info
 
    # Select the log format
    JkLogStampFormat "[%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y] "
 
    # JkOptions indicate to send SSL KEY SIZE,
    JkOptions +ForwardKeySize +ForwardURICompat -ForwardDirectories
 
    # JkRequestLogFormat set the request format
    JkRequestLogFormat "%w %V %T"
 
    #Adding jsf preffix to proccess by tomcat
    JkMount /*.jsf ajp13

sudo /etc/init.d/httpd restart

Deploying remotely with Maven/Cargo

Inspired in this article from the great John Ferguson Smart. You can add the plugin in your pom.xml:

<plugin>
				<groupid>org.codehaus.cargo</groupid>
				<artifactid>cargo-maven2-plugin</artifactid>
				<version>1.0</version>
				<configuration>
					<!-- Container configuration -->
					<container>
						<containerid>tomcat6x</containerid>
						<type>remote</type>
					</container>
					<configuration>
						<type>runtime</type>
<properties>
							<cargo.remote.username>tomcat</cargo.remote.username>
							<cargo.remote.password></cargo.remote.password>
							<cargo.tomcat.manager.url>http://labs.lebrijo.com:8080/manager</cargo.tomcat.manager.url>
						</properties>
					</configuration>
				</configuration>
			</plugin>

And deploy remotely with the following command:

mvn package cargo:redeploy

Hope enjoy!!!

Installation and memory heap

GZIP compression

Redirecting to port 80

Deploying remotely with Maven/Cargo

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