20170530 Raspberry Pi - Developer Tools 4 - Tomcat Web Server

Working on a software generating HTML pages makes it necessary to test these pages with a real web server.

I use Tomcat on my Raspberry Pi to test the pages on my Ipad.

You get Tomcat here, I currently use version 7.0.72 .

I have downloaded the tar.gz archive and unzipped it to /home/bin/tomcat.

I don’t want to run Tomcat as a service, but I want to have it started at boot-time, so I have added this line at the end of .bashrc :

/home/pi/bin/tomcat/bin/startup.sh

FYI :

My first try was to do it with a cronjob with @reboot, but that did not work. Googling showed that this seems to be a common problem and that it could take longer to find out why. I will have a look at cronjobs later.
I have tested that starting an ssh session only starts a new webserver when it was shut down before, for now this hack is ok for me.

To access static HTML pages I have put these Context lines at the end of the host block :

        ...
        <Context docBase="/home/pi" path="pi" />
        <Context docBase="/mnt/usbstickext4/pi/gitrepo/piblog/outputHTML" path="/blog" />
      </Host>
    </Engine>
  </Service>
</Server>

This enables Tomcat to serve my home on the Pi under /pi and my built blog pages under /blog

This is an example URL for /pi to read a log file located in the home folder :

http://10.0.0.51:8080/pi/pibashrc.log

and this is how I access the blog on the Pi :

http://10.0.0.51:8080/blog/index.html