Running multiple Tomcat instances on one server

Here's a brief step by step guide to running more than one instance of Tomcat on a single machine.

Step 1: Install the Tomcat files

Download Tomcat 4.1 or 5.5, and unzip it into an appropriate directory. I usually put it in /usr/local, so it ends up in a directory called /usr/local/apache-tomcat-5.5.17 (5.5.17 being the current version as of this writing), and make a symlink named /usr/local/tomcat to that directory. When later versions come out, I can unzip them and relink, leaving the older version in case things don't work out (which rarely if ever happens, but I'm paranoid).

Step 2: Make directories for each instance

For each instance of Tomcat you're going to run, you'll need a directory that will be CATALINA_HOME. For example, you might make them /var/tomcat/serverA and /var/tomcat/serverB.

In each of these directories you need the following subdirectories: conf, logs, temp, webapps, and work.

Put a server.xml and web.xml file in the conf directory. You can get these from the conf directory of the directory where you put the tomcat installation files, although of course you should tighten up your server.xml a bit.

The webapps directory is where you'll put the web applications you want to run on the particular instance of Tomcat.

I like to have the Tomcat manager webapp installed on each instance, so I can play with the webapps, and see how many active sessions there are. See my instructions for configuring the Tomcat manager webapp.

Step 3: Configure the ports and/or addresses for each instance

Tomcat listens to at least two network ports, one for the shutdown command, and one or more for accepting requests. Two instances of Tomcat can't listen to the same port number on the same IP address, so you will need to edit your server.xml files to change the ports they listen to.

The first port to look at is the shutdown port. This is used by the command line shutdown script (actually, but the Java code it runs) to tell the Tomcat instance to shut itself down. This port is defined at the top of the server.xml file for the instance.