Ubuntu 12.04 Lucee 4 with Tomcat7 multi instance

Introduction

This page try to clarify the installation of Lucee 4.0 in Ubuntu 12.04 with Java7, Tomcat 7 with multiple instances and Apache webserver acting as a front-end.

All instances will serve the same website.

I’m really not a Lucee or Java expert, feel free to comment and revise the document.

Installing basic packages

• Java 7 apt-get install openjdk-7-jre-headless

• Tomcat7, Apache2

  apt-get install tomcat7 tomcat7-admin apache2 libapache2-mod-jk

• Remove Java6 if any:

  apt-get purge openjdk-6-jre-headless icedtea-6-jre-cacao openjdk-6-jre-lib icedtea-6-jre-jamvm

• Install fontconfig and some fonts (cfchart could not find the fonts in my code without it)

  apt-get install fontconfig ttf-mscorefonts-installer

Lucee 5

I will first install the .war and let Tomcat to deploy it. After that, move the lucee lib to a lib directory inside the tomcat7 system installation:

wget https://cdn.lucee.org/lucee-5.2.9.31.war -O lucee-5.2.9.31.war
cp lucee-5.2.9.31.war /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/lucee.war
service tomcat7 start
mkdir /usr/share/tomcat7/lucee
cp -R /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/lucee/WEB-INF/lib/* /usr/share/tomcat7/lucee
chown -R tomcat7.tomcat7 /usr/share/tomcat7/lucee
service tomcat7 stop
rm -rf /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/lucee/ /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/lucee.war

Tomcat

Configure Tomcat to load the new lucee lib directory. Edit the file /etc/tomcat7/catalina.properties and change the line common.loader to:

common.loader=${catalina.base}/lib,${catalina.base}/lib/*.jar,${catalina.home}/lib,${catalina.home}/lib/*.jar,/var/lib/tomcat7/common/classes,/var/lib/tomcat7/common/*.jar,${catalina.home}/lucee,${catalina.home}/lucee/*.jar

Edit /etc/tomcat7/web.xml

Add servlet for cfm inside the webapp section:

<servlet>
	<servlet-name>GLOBALCFMLServlet</servlet-name>
	<description>CFML runtime Engine</description>
	<servlet-class>lucee.loader.servlet.CFMLServlet</servlet-class>
	<init-param>
	<param-name>configuration</param-name>
	<param-value>/usr/share/tomcat7/lucee</param-value>
	<description>Configuration directory</description>
	</init-param>
	<init-param>
	<param-name>lucee-server-root</param-name>
	<param-value>.</param-value>
	<description>directory where lucee root directory is stored</description>
	</init-param>
	<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet>
	<servlet-name>GLOBALAMFServlet</servlet-name>
	<description>AMF Servlet for flash remoting</description>
	<servlet-class>lucee.loader.servlet.AMFServlet</servlet-class>
	<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet>
<servlet-name>GLOBALFileServlet</servlet-name>
	<description>File Servlet for simple files</description>
	<servlet-class>lucee.loader.servlet.FileServlet</servlet-class>
	<load-on-startup>2</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
	<servlet-name>GLOBALCFMLServlet</servlet-name>
	<url-pattern>*.cfm</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
<servlet-mapping>
	<servlet-name>GLOBALCFMLServlet</servlet-name>
	<url-pattern>*.cfml</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
<servlet-mapping>
	<servlet-name>GLOBALCFMLServlet</servlet-name>
	<url-pattern>*.cfc</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
<servlet-mapping>
	<servlet-name>GLOBALAMFServlet</servlet-name>
	<url-pattern>/openamf/gateway/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

/etc/tomcat7/server.xml

Uncomment the line:

<Connector port="8009" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" />

Inside the "Engine Catalina" block add:

<Host name="www.mysite.com" appBase="webapps">
  <Context path="" docBase="/var/www/mysite/" />
  <Alias>mysite.com</Alias>
</Host>

This file will be the "template" for the 3 instance that we will configure later.

/etc/default/tomcat7

This file control the Java options of the tomcat server. This depends of your hardware. I only put mine as a reference:

JAVA_OPTS="-Djava.awt.headless=true -Xms2048m -Xmx2048m -XX:PermSize=1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=1024m -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC"
JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC"

The -Xms and -Xmx options controls the memory initial and maximum of the tomcat server. Adjust to your host memory.

Tomcat multi-instance

Multi-instance tomcat it just various tomcat servers with their own configuration. Each tomcat server will listen on different ports. In front of these tomcat instances we will put an Apache web server that will route the users requests to them.

We will install the instances in /var/lib/tomcat7/instanceX/ directories:

cd /var/lib/tomcat7/
mkdir instance1 instance2 instance3
cd instanceX
mkdir conf logs temp work webapps
cd ..
chown -R tomcat7.tomcat7 instance1 instance2 instance3

We now will link the common configuration files, so editing the main /etc/tomcat7/ file, we change the conf of the 3 instance. If you prefer you can copy instead of link, so you can control each instance individually.

[per instance directory]
cd conf
ln -s /etc/tomcat7/catalina.properties .
ln -s /etc/tomcat7/web.xml .
ln -s /etc/tomcat7/policy.d/ .

The server.xml needs to be copied into each instance conf directory and its listening ports changed:

cp /etc/tomcat7/server.xml ./conf/

Edit server.xml and change the lines:

<Server port="8001" shutdown="SHUTDOWN">
<Connector port="8081" protocol="HTTP/1.1"
connectionTimeout="20000"
URIEncoding="UTF-8"
redirectPort="8443" />
<Connector port="8101" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" />

In the other two instance change the port to 8002, 8082 and 8102 in instance2 and 8003, 8083 and 8103 in instance3.

Tomcat instance init script

The script that controls tomcat is /etc/init.d/tomcat7. We need to copy this script to control each instance, so we can start/stop each instance individually:

cd /etc/init.d
cp tomcat7 tomcat7-instance1

Edit the file and add the following line to the definitions block: INSTANCE=instance1

Change: DESC="Tomcat servlet engine" to: DESC="Tomcat servlet engine $INSTANCE"

Change: CATALINA_BASE=/var/lib/$NAME to: CATALINA_BASE=/var/lib/$NAME/$INSTANCE

Change: CATALINA_PID="/var/run/$NAME.pid" to: CATALINA_PID="/var/run/$NAME-$INSTANCE.pid"

Copy the tomcat7-instance1 for the two other instances and edit the INSTANCE variable:

cp tomcat7-instance1 tomcat7-instance2
cp tomcat7-instance1 tomcat7-instance3

We can now start each instance:

service tomcat7-instance1 start
service tomcat7-instance2 start
service tomcat7-instance3 start

Configure the scripts to start at system startup:

update-rc.d tomcat7-instance1 defaults
update-rc.d tomcat7-instance2 defaults
update-rc.d tomcat7-instance3 defaults

Disable the original tomcat7:

update-rc.d tomcat7 disable

Now you can access to each instance in the ports 8081, 8082 and 8083. Remember, each instance have a Lucee server page and configuration:

http://mysite.com:8081/lucee/admin/server.cfm

APACHE

Edit the file /etc/libapache2-mod-jk/workers.properties with:

workers.tomcat_home=/usr/share/tomcat7
workers.java_home=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-amd64
ps=/
worker.list=loadbalancer
worker.worker1.port=8101
worker.worker1.host=localhost
worker.worker1.type=ajp13
worker.worker2.port=8102
worker.worker2.host=localhost
worker.worker2.type=ajp13
worker.worker3.port=8103
worker.worker3.host=localhost
worker.worker3.type=ajp13
worker.worker1.lbfactor=1
worker.worker2.lbfactor=1
worker.worker3.lbfactor=1
worker.loadbalancer.type=lb
worker.loadbalancer.balance_workers=worker1,worker2,worker3

Add the following lines to /etc/apache2/mods-available/jk.conf inside ifModule directive:

JkMount /*.cfm loadbalancer
JkMount /*.cfc loadbalancer
JkMount /*.do loadbalancer
JkMount /*.jsp loadbalancer
JkMount /*.cfchart loadbalancer
JkMount /*.cfm/* loadbalancer
JkMount /*.cfml/* loadbalancer
JkMountCopy all
JkLogFile /var/log/apache2/mod_jk.log

Create a virtual host in /etc/apache2/sites-available/mysite.com

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerAdmin admin@mysite.com
  DocumentRoot "/var/www/mysite/"
  DirectoryIndex index.cfm index.html
  ServerName mysite.com
  ServerAlias www.mysite.com
  ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/mysite.error.log
  CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/mysite.access.log Combined
</VirtualHost>

Enable the site and reload apache:

a2ensite mysite.com
service apache2 restart

Copy your application in /var/www/mysite/ and now we can go to http://www.mysite.com Lucee admin can be reached at http://www.mysite.com/lucee/admin/server.cfm

If something goes wrong

You can check the following logs files:

/var/log/tomcat7/catalina.out -> Tomcat log
/var/log/apache2/mod_jk.log -> Module JK log
/var/log/apache2/error.log -> Apache error log
/var/log/apache2/mysite.error.log -> Vhost error log

You can test if the tomcat instances are working correctly going to http://mysite.com:8081 for instance1 and so on.