The Apache Tomcat Servlet/JSP Container

Apache Tomcat 7

Version 7.0.52, Oct 10 2018
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Apache Tomcat Development

Building Tomcat

Table of Contents
Introduction

Building Apache Tomcat from source is very easy, and is the first step to contributing to Tomcat. The following is a step by step guide.

Download a Java Development Kit (JDK) version 6

Building Apache Tomcat requires a JDK (version 6) to be installed. You can download one from
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html
or from another JDK vendor.

IMPORTANT: Set an environment variable JAVA_HOME to the pathname of the directory into which you installed the JDK release.

Install Apache Ant 1.8.1 or later

Download a binary distribution of Ant 1.8.1 or later from here.

Unpack the binary distribution into a convenient location so that the Ant release resides in its own directory (conventionally named apache-ant-1.8.x). For the remainder of this guide, the symbolic name ${ant.home} is used to refer to the full pathname of the Ant installation directory directory.

IMPORTANT: Create an ANT_HOME environment variable to point the directory ${ant.home}, and modify the PATH environment variable to include directory ${ant.home}/bin in its list. This makes the ant command line script available, which will be used to actually perform the build.

Checkout or obtain the source code for Tomcat 7.0

Tomcat 7.0 SVN repository URL: http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/tomcat/tc7.0.x/trunk/

Tomcat source packages: http://tomcat.apache.org/download-70.cgi.

Checkout the source using SVN, selecting a tag for released version or trunk for the current development code, or download and unpack a source package. For the remainder of this guide, the symbolic name ${tomcat.source} is used to refer to the location where the source has been placed.

Building Tomcat

Use the following commands to build Tomcat:

cd ${tomcat.source}
ant

WARNING: Running this command will download libraries required to build Tomcat to the /usr/share/java directory by default. On a typical Linux or MacOX system, an ordinary user will not have access to write to this directory, and, even if you do, it is likely not appropriate for you to write there. On Windows this usually corresponds to the C:\usr\share\java directory, unless Cygwin is used. Read below to learn how to customize the directory used to download the binaries.

NOTE: Users accessing the Internet through a proxy must use a properties file to indicate to Ant the proxy configuration. Read below for details.

The build can be controlled by creating a ${tomcat.source}/build.properties file and adding the following content to it:

# ----- Proxy setup -----
# Uncomment if using a proxy server.
#proxy.host=proxy.domain
#proxy.port=8080
#proxy.use=on

# ----- Default Base Path for Dependent Packages -----
# Replace this path with the directory path where
# dependencies binaries should be downloaded.
base.path=/home/me/some-place-to-download-to

Once the build has completed successfully, a usable Tomcat installation will have been produced in the ${tomcat.source}/output/build directory, and can be started and stopped with the usual scripts.

Building with Eclipse

IMPORTANT: This is not a supported means of building Tomcat; this information is provided without warranty :-). The only supported means of building Tomcat is with the Ant build described above. However, some developers like to work on Java code with a Java IDE, and the following steps have been used by some developers.

NOTE: This will not let you build everything under Eclipse; the build process requires use of Ant for the many stages that aren't simple Java compilations. However, it will allow you to view and edit the Java code, get warnings, reformat code, perform refactorings, run Tomcat under the IDE, and so on.

WARNING: Do not forget to create and configure ${tomcat.source}/build.properties file as described above before running any Ant targets.

Sample Eclipse project files and launch targets are provided in the res/ide-support/eclipse directory of the source tree. The instructions below will automatically copy these into the required locations.

An Ant target is provided as a convenience to download all binary dependencies, and to create the Eclipse project and classpath files in the root of the source tree.

cd ${tomcat.source}
ant ide-eclipse

Start Eclipse and create a new Workspace.

Open the Preferences dialog and then select Java->Build Path->Classpath Variables to add two new Classpath Variables:

TOMCAT_LIBS_BASEThe same location as the base.path setting in build.properties, where the binary dependencies have been downloaded
ANT_HOMEthe base path of Ant 1.8.1 or later

Use File->Import and choose Existing Projects into Workspace. From there choose the root directory of the Tomcat source tree (${tomcat.source}) and import the Tomcat project located there.

start-tomcat and stop-tomcat launch configurations are provided in res/ide-support/eclipse and will be available in the Run->Run Configurations dialog. Use these to start and stop Tomcat from Eclipse.
If you want to configure these yourself (or are using a different IDE) then use org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap as the main class, start/stop etc. as program arguments, and specify -Dcatalina.home=... (with the name of your build directory) as VM arguments.

Tweaking a few formatting preferences will make it much easier to keep consistent with Tomcat coding conventions (and have your contributions accepted):

Java -> Code Style -> Formatter -> Edit... Tab policy: Spaces only
Tab and Indentation size: 4
General -> Editors -> Text Editors Displayed tab width: 2
Insert spaces for tabs
Show whitespace characters (optional)
XML -> XML Files -> EditorIndent using spaces
Indentation size: 2
Ant -> Editor -> FormatterTab size: 2
Use tab character instead of spaces: unchecked

Building with other IDEs

The same general approach should work for most IDEs; it has been reported to work in IntelliJ IDEA, for example.

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