Day 27: Tomcat Setup, Code Build & Deployment

👋 Hey everyone! Welcome to Day 27 of my DevOps journey. This is the third article in my mini-series on setting up a complete Java stack manually using multi-stage Vagrant VMs.

🛠️ Recap So Far

In the past two days, we:

• 🎯 Set up a multi-VM environment with Vagrant

• 🧩 Explored plugins and provisioning options

• 🗄️ Installed and configured services like MySQL, Memcached, and RabbitMQ

Now, it's time to set up the Tomcat application server and deploy the Java project.

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☕ Step 1: Login to Tomcat VM

vagrant ssh app01

Make sure the /etc/hosts file has valid hostname mappings for all services.

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🔧 Step 2: Install Prerequisites

sudo -i
yum update -y
yum install epel-release -y
dnf -y install java-11-openjdk java-11-openjdk-devel
dnf install git maven wget -y

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📦 Step 3: Install & Configure Tomcat

cd /tmp/
wget https://archive.apache.org/dist/tomcat/tomcat-9/v9.0.75/bin/apache-tomcat-9.0.75.tar.gz
tar xzvf apache-tomcat-9.0.75.tar.gz
useradd --home-dir /usr/local/tomcat --shell /sbin/nologin tomcat
cp -r apache-tomcat-9.0.75/* /usr/local/tomcat/
chown -R tomcat:tomcat /usr/local/tomcat/

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🖥️ Step 4: Create systemd Service

Create /etc/systemd/system/tomcat.service:

[Unit]
Description=Tomcat
After=network.target

[Service]
User=tomcat
WorkingDirectory=/usr/local/tomcat
Environment=JRE_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/jre
Environment=JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/jre
Environment=CATALINA_HOME=/usr/local/tomcat
Environment=CATALINA_BASE=/usr/local/tomcat
ExecStart=/usr/local/tomcat/bin/catalina.sh run
ExecStop=/usr/local/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh
SyslogIdentifier=tomcat-%i

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then reload and start the service:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl start tomcat
systemctl enable tomcat

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🔥 Step 5: Open Firewall

systemctl start firewalld
firewall-cmd --zone=public --add-port=8080/tcp --permanent
firewall-cmd --reload

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🧪 Step 6: Download & Build the Java App

git clone -b main https://github.com/hkhcoder/vprofile-project.git
cd vprofile-project
vim src/main/resources/application.properties

Update backend service references to other VMs.

Then:

mvn install

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🚚 Step 7: Deploy WAR to Tomcat

systemctl stop tomcat
rm -rf /usr/local/tomcat/webapps/ROOT*
cp target/vprofile-v2.war /usr/local/tomcat/webapps/ROOT.war
chown -R tomcat:tomcat /usr/local/tomcat/webapps
systemctl start tomcat

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✅ Result

The app should now be accessible via Nginx or directly via Tomcat (port 8080). This completes the backend service setup!

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📌 What’s Next?

In the next article (Day 28), we’ll configure the frontend Nginx web server to serve the application using reverse proxying.

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📢 Follow along if you're learning DevOps step by step. Share your feedback or setup variations!

#DevOps #Vagrant #Tomcat #Java #Linux #Systemd #ManualProvisioning #DevOpsJourney

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