scott conklin's List: Railo

• Railo for Dummies Part III

   

   Today, let's get Railo running on Tomcat! Why Tomcat? It's a robust, high-performance Java-based web server and Servlet engine and it's also very light and lean. Tomcat is also the basis of the JBoss Web Server (I'll probably cover JBoss later in this series) so all that you learn about getting things up and running on Tomcat can be carried over to JBoss when you need a full JEE server rather than "just" a Servlet engine.

  • This describes how to get Railo running on Tomcat -- a Java Servelet Engine.
    Q: what is the difference between a full JEE server than just a servlet engine

• If you're still in the bin folder, you can start Tomcat by typing:

  sh startup.sh

  or:

  ./startup.sh

  You should just get four lines of output saying which paths it is using. That's it, Tomcat is running!

  • Note: the startup.bat file calls the catalina.bat, which must have a reference to the jdk. usiing the JAVA_HOME environment var.
    
    set JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_13

  • for windows this startup.bat.
• You can now remove railo.war or at least move it somewhere else in case you need it again

  • don't forget to do this or it will redeploy everytime you cycle the service
• nfortunately tomcat does not support ses style urls. I have actually reported a bug to them and hopefully it will be fixed in future versions of tomcat. My sugestion is to use apache with a connector to tomcat. Then you can leverage mod rewrite

   

  Posted By Luis majano / Posted At 3/28/09 1:32 AM

   

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  See the Appendix to Part IV where I offer a potential workaround:

   http://corfield.org/entry/Railo_for_Dummies_Part_IV_Appendix

  • a reference to a workaround on how to get tomcat to work with ses

• I use Apache in front of Tomcat and use mod_rewrite.

   

  Posted By Luis Majano / Posted At 3/29/09 3:03 PM

  • Luis M. saying that he uses apache as a web server to proxy to tomcat. this addresses the ses issue, answering a previous question on why to do this and just not let tomcat act as webserver on port 80
• Sean,

   Following what you did on part I and II, I installed ColdBox within ~/Downloads/apache-tomcat-6.0.18/webapps/railo I was able to run the Dashboard and created an application, but I got a 404 when I attempted to access the Railo Administrator. Is that supposed to happen? If not what do we need to do to get it to work?

   Thanks,

   

  Posted By Miguel Ulloa / Posted At 4/28/09 2:42 AM

   

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  @Miguel, I suspect ColdBox assumes /railo-context/admin/ is the path to the Railo admin but if you use a WAR, the path would be /railo/railo-context/admin/ instead (so, technically, it's a bug in ColdBox not respecting the context root of the web app).

   

  Posted By Sean Corfield / Posted At 4/29/09 12:47 PM

  • I had this same issue, but after following the next post and configuring the root to look at intenpub the problem went away.

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• Railo for Dummies Part IV

   

   After getting a very basic Railo+Tomcat setup running, now we're going to make it more robust and more 'production-ready' (you'll want to do more than I'm going to show so I'd refer you to the extensive Tomcat documentation for deeper configuration). I'm just going to show how to get Tomcat integrated with Apache in a couple of ways so you can run a 'real' website on it.

  • After setting up Railo and Tomcat, this article shows how to make it more production friendly like making Ralio the root web application and makiing it run over port 80
• , I renamed the ROOT folder, under webapps, welcome (you could - and probably should - remove it altogether on production). Then I renamed railo to ROOT.

• Enabling Tomcat Users (optional)

   If you want to look at the Tomcat Manager console, you need to do one more piece of configuration on Tomcat: adding a Tomcat user. In the Finder, navigate to the conf folder under Tomcat and open tomcat-users.xml with your favorite text editor (I use TextMate because it supports SVN, CFML and a number of other languages but you can easily use the built-in TextEdit application). In the <tomcat-users> section, add a user definition like this:

  <user username="someuser" password="secret" roles="admin,manager"/>

  • you must also define the manager role using the roles tag.

• Changing the Tomcat web root

   By default, Tomcat assumes the web root for each application is a folder under webapps. Also by default, the URL for each web application begins with a 'context root' that is the name of that directory (with the empty context - / - for the ROOT folder). This behavior is controlled by Tomcat's conf/server.xml file. Open it up in your favorite text editor and go to the bottom of the file. You'll see a <Host..> section that defines the behavior for the default virtual host. You can add <Context..> tags inside this section to override the default 'context root' behavior for web applications.

   For my setup, I want the web root to be /Users/scorfield/Sites for the empty context so that I can browse a local copy of my corfield.org site. I added:

  <Context path="" docBase="/Users/scorfield/Sites"/>

  Then I copied the WEB-INF folder from Tomcat's webapps/ROOT folder to my local site and restarted Tomcat. WEB-INF contains the full definition of a Java web application so you can easily clone applications just by copying them. Now, when I browse to http://localhost:8080/ I get the local copy of my website instead of the default Railo site under Tomcat!

  • This snippet explains how to change the webroot of tomcat to somehting other than the default of webapps
• Configuring Apache with Tomcat
• You could simply tell Tomcat to use port 80 and leave Apache out of the picture altogether. Just change the port= attribute from 8080 to 80 on the <Connector..> tag for the Catalina service in Tomcat's conf/server.xml file.

• The easiest way to connect Apache to Tomcat is to proxy requests. This way you have control over which URLs are passed to Tomcat and can easily leverage all the other useful Apache modules. Here's an example of an Apache virtual host for railo.corfield.org (an entry in my /etc/hosts file that points to 127.0.0.1 for testing my site locally):

  <VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName railo.corfield.org
  
  DocumentRoot /Users/scorfield/Sites
  
  ProxyRequests Off
  <Proxy *>
  Order deny,allow
  Allow from all
  </Proxy>
  
  ProxyPass / http://localhost:8080/
  ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:8080/
  </VirtualHost>

  This maps any request to Apache for http://railo.corfield.org/ to Tomcat using the empty context root, which we already mapped to the same document root above. I can use additional ProxyPass directives to exclude mapping certain requests. For example, I could exclude my images directory (and let Apache serve that instead of Tomcat) by adding this as the first ProxyPass directive:

  ProxyPass /images !

  I added the virtual host above to /etc/apache2/extra/proxy.conf and then edited /etc/apache2/httpd.conf to add the following immediately after the NameVirtualHost *:80 directive:

  Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/proxy.conf

  • NOTE my configuration went a little different. I added the the virtual hosts entry to the C:\Apache\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf and
    uncommented the include line in the C:\Apache\conf\httpd.conf file
• I've also to mention, that one has also to enable these modules for apache e.g. in this case all of the proxy-Modules.

  • this is important. you must uncomment the following load module lines in the httpd.conf file:
    LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so
    LoadModule proxy_ajp_module modules/mod_proxy_ajp.so
    LoadModule proxy_balancer_module modules/mod_proxy_balancer.so
    LoadModule proxy_connect_module modules/mod_proxy_connect.so
    LoadModule proxy_ftp_module modules/mod_proxy_ftp.so
    LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so
• Also, key to the security of all this is making SURE that ProxyRequests is set to Off. Open proxy servers are bad news for you and the tubes as a whole. :-)

  • Make sure this is done= ProxyRequests off

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• Tomcat can't find Java. You can either set a JAVA_HOME environment variable, or you can explicitly tell Tomcat where to find Java by adding the JAVA_HOME location to the catalina.sh script in the bin directory. Open catalina.sh in your favorite text editor, and after the big block of comments at the top of the file (denoted with # signs), add the following line:
  
  JAVA_HOME=/path/to/your/jdk
  
  
• • Copy the WAR file to /path/to/tomcat/webapps. In this case since the file name includes the version number, I did a cp railo-3.0.2.001.war /path/to/tomcat/webapps/railo.war, which will make the context path "railo"
• • KEY STEP: Choose an installation type of "J2EE Configuration (WAR file)"
• • Select the stuff you don't want to include in the installation. I typically uncheck all four choices (docs, LiveCycle, search services, and start on init) when I generate a WAR
• You can configure tomcat itself to look for war files anywhere on the system by adding a context element to server.xml (Confluence standalone does this very nicely refer to it as a good example). Maybe later I'll post my ANT file for people if they want to use it to deploy to the different war's (which is how I have my dev setup). I have a builder attached to each Eclipse project which deploys the code to all configured war files.

• Anyone interested in doing it this way is probably looking for is allowLinking. You would specify this in a context element in the server.xml (due to windows security issues this is disabled by default). More info:

   

  http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/config/context.html

  • adding contexts to server.xml and allowlinking reference
• I believe you can configure Tomcat to serve specific directories for specific hostnames and then you could use a symlink from webapps/something to the actual webroot?

• Counterproductive because ... ? You can set things up a bunch of different ways, but I think the notion of "use Apache for static content because it will be faster" is antiquated at this point (and it's a notion I held until I read more about the various Tomcat connectors). Using the native Tomcat HTTP connector is actually going to perform better than using the AJP connector, which would hand CFML processing off to Tomcat while Apache would handle everything else.

   

  So what I'm saying is unless you really *need* Apache (and you may ...) you can use the HTTP connector built into Tomcat and get far better performance for both dynamic and static content, and the setup is a lot more straight-forward.

   

  On my VPS right now I'm using Apache and just proxying out to Tomcat + OpenBD for all my CFML content. I did it this way because I already had Apache configured, and I do have a couple of sites running on here that are straight HTML, but I'm going to convert these over because proxying is actually the least performant option. As fast as things run even using proxying I can't wait to see how fast things run on Tomcat with the native HTTP connector. :-)

   

   Posted by Matt Woodward @ 2/2/09 10:30 PM 

  • Matt w makes an argument that the Tomcat HTTP connector is actually going to perform better than using the AJP connector, which would hand CFML processing off to Tomcat while Apache would handle everything else.
• Then I can create Apache vhosts to point to the correct folder for that project
• You can also do more full-blown URL rewriting on Tomcat, either directly or through an add-on. I haven't tried it myself but Tomcat does include a URLRewriteFilter that lets you put rewrite rules in place.

  • Tomcat ablet to perfrom url rewritng

• Has anyone figured out to configure railo and coldfusion to use the same webroot on a windows machine?

   

  I can specify a webroot in the railo administrator but i can't tell how to do this for coldfusion. If you are interested in details, take a look here: http://serverfault.com/questions/47109/coldfusion-8-does-not-accept-document-root-that-is-set-with-apache

   

   Posted by mrt181 @ 7/28/09 11:29 PM 

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