Tomcat 7 on RHEL 6 []

(http://travis-ci.org/laurilehmijoki/tomcat7_rhel)

This package is broken!

At the moment the indices of the JPackage Project are corrupted. As a result, this Puppet module is broken.

The indices point to Tomcat 7.0.34, whereas the mirrors only contain the version 7.0.39.

Until this is fixed, best solution is to create a local mirror (with fixed indices) of JPP6, which is what I've done here. Creating a local YUM repo is left as an exercise for the reader.

Verifying that the indices do not work

Open http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/jpackage/6.0/generic/free/RPMS/ and find tomcat7
Note the version of the tomcat7 RPM package
Open http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/jpackage/6.0/generic/free/repodata/filelists.xml.gz and check if the tomcat7 entry in the filelists.xml points to a different version that what's available (refer to steps 1 and 2 here)
If the versions do not match, this project does not work. Go do something else!
If the versions match, please notify lauri.lehmijoki@iki.fi

Features

Deploy multiple Tomcat instances on same machine ("the base + home setup")
Use Tomcat Manager for deployment
Use JMX for monitoring the Tomcat instances
Use a ready-made smoke test script to test whether your web application is up and running

Install

puppet module install llehmijo/tomcat7_rhel

Example usage

Configure Puppet

# In site.pp
node "superserver" {
  tomcat7_rhel::tomcat_application { "my-web-application":
    application_root => "/opt",
    tomcat_user => "webuser",
    tomcat_port => "8080",
    jvm_envs => "-server -Xmx1024m -Xms128m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -Dmy.java.opt=i_love_java -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false -Djava.rmi.server.hostname=some.ip.address",
    tomcat_manager => true,
    tomcat_admin_user => "superuser",
    tomcat_admin_password => "secretpassword",
    smoke_test_path => "/health-check"
    jmx_registry_port => 10054,
    jmx_server_port => 10053
  }

  tomcat7_rhel::tomcat_application { "my-second-application":
    application_root => "/opt",
    tomcat_user => "webuser",
    tomcat_port => "8090",
    disable_access_log => true,
    jvm_envs => "-server -Xmx1024m -Xms128m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -Dmy.java.opt=i_love_scala -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false -Djava.rmi.server.hostname=some.ip.address"
  }
}

Adding extra configuration into the `<Engine>` tag of `server.xml`

You can include additional configuration in the <Engine> tag of you server.xml by including a valid engine value in the server_xml_engine_config parameter of tomcat7_rhel::tomcat_application.

For example, you can enable Tomcat 7 session replication with the help of the server_xml_engine_config parameter. See the example below for more info.

Enabling session replication

Take a look at Tomcat 7 Clustering/Session Replication HOW-TO.

Enable default clustering by passing server_xml_engine_config into tomcat7_rhel::tomcat_application:

server_xml_engine_config => "<Cluster className="org.apache.catalina.ha.tcp.SimpleTcpCluster"/>"

Full control over the clustering xml fragment can be done conveniently by using your own template:

server_xml_engine_config => template("mymodule/my_tomcat_cluster_config.erb")

Deploy

Without Tomcat Manager

scp app.war webuser@superserver:~/app.war
ssh webuser@superserver "rm -rf /opt/my-web-application/webapps/*"
ssh webuser@superserver "cp ~/app.war /opt/my-web-application/webapps/ROOT.war"
ssh webuser@superserver "sudo service my-web-application restart"

With Tomcat Manager

scp app.war webuser@superserver:/tmp/app.war
ssh webuser@superserver "/opt/my-web-application/bin/deploy_with_tomcat_manager.sh /tmp/app.war"

Note that if you deploy with Manager, make sure your application shuts down correctly when Tomcat calls the ServletContextListener#contextDestroyed method, otherwise you will eventually experience out-of-memory errors.

You can use the check_memory_leaks.sh to find memory leaks. It's under the bin directory of your web application.

You can also use the parallel deployment feature of Tomcat (http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/config/context.html#Parallel_deployment)

scp app.war webuser@superserver:/tmp/app.war
ssh webuser@superserver "/opt/my-web-application/bin/deploy_with_tomcat_manager.sh /tmp/app.war 1.2"

The above example starts a new version (1.2) of application in the same context path as the old one, without shutting down the old version, meaning that new sessions (and requests) will go to the new instance, while existing sessions stay in the old version of application. This results in zero downtime for your application.

You can list the running applications and their versions:

ssh webuser@superserver "/opt/my-web-application/bin/list-applications.sh"

And undeploy an old version of the application:

ssh webuser@superserver "/opt/my-web-application/bin/undeploy_with_tomcat_manager.sh 1.1"

Run smoke test on the application

ssh webuser@superserver "/opt/my-web-application/bin/run_smoke_test.sh"

Development

Versioning

This project uses Semantic Versioning.

Testing

We test this project with http://rspec-puppet.com/.

You can run the tests like this:

bundle install # Installs the Ruby gems that we use for testing
rake

Links

This project in Puppet Forge: http://forge.puppetlabs.com/llehmijo/tomcat7_rhel.

cwells/tomcat7_rhel