Using your own instance of Tomcat

If you are using your own Tomcat instance instead of PAS, Infinite Blue recommends the following:

  • Use an instance of Tomcat dedicated to Platform. Download a version of Tomcat that Infinite Blue certifies.
    Note:

    If you are using Tomcat, you must prevent it from scanning the Platform JAR file by adding the following line to the context.xml file in the conf folder of the Tomcat installation: 

    <JarScanner scanClassPath="false" scanAllFiles="false" scanAllDirectories="false"/>

    See Supported browsers and platforms for more information on the latest version of Tomcat.

  • Start by using the default port 8080 for Tomcat. Later you can add Apache as a gateway to your Tomcat instance (Apache typically runs on port 80).
  • Follow Apache's installation instructions. Once installed, start Tomcat and point your browser to http://localhost:8080 to make sure that you see the Tomcat welcome page. Stop Tomcat once confirmed.
  • Run Tomcat from the command line during installation. To do this open a command prompt window and go to the bin directory within your Tomcat folder and run tomcatX.exe (where X is the main version number of your Tomcat installation).
  • The default Tomcat installation is optimal for development purposes. For deployment, you will likely want to increase security. See the Tomcat documentation for details.
  • Set Tomcat up to use as much memory as you can spare for its initial and maximum memory pools: for example, 1500MB in production on a 32-bit machine (you can more than double this for a 64-bit OS). However, if you set memory requirements too high, Tomcat will fail to start.
  • Disable session persistence: un-comment the section of conf/context.xml related to session persistence.
  • For proper UTF-8 support, add server.xml include a URIEncoding attribute with value of UTF-8 to all Connector nodes: 
    <Connector port="8009" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" URIEncoding="UTF-8"/>
  • To ensure that portal user log in sessions last long enough, update the <session-timeout> node value in the web.xml configuration file in the conf directory. The default timeout is 30 minutes. The appropriate value depends on your application and end-users usage patterns.
  • After you have verified that the settings work well, you can set up the Tomcat instance as a Windows Service or Linux Daemon. Refer Tomcat documentation.
  • Periodically delete files from Tomcat's log directory.