Windows Services for Tomcat
The installation of both Tomcat 5.0.28 and Tomcat 5.5.17 on a single server caused some problems yesterday. Plan A was to use the Windows Executable installers, thinking that they would make the job easier. Not so, in this case.
What we needed was Tomcat 5.0.28 running on JDK 1.4.2, and Tomcat 5.5.17 running on JDK 1.5.0, a Windows service for each, all on the one Windows 2000 Server. However, even when the “service” option was unchecked during installation the Windows Executable installers still created Windows services.
The problem was the installers for both 5.0.28 and 5.5.17 were attempting to create services named “Tomcat5”. Not good.
Plan B was to use the Zip install option for Tomcat and use tomcat.exe to manually create a Windows services. After Googling on the latter it was not clear how this works, mainly because I didn’t find the documentation.
Planc C was to use the Java Service Wrapper. There are detailed instructions on setting up services for Tomcat. Worked a treat!
All the settings are in the wrapper.conf file, so it’s simple to make changes like increasing the maximum heap size. Just check your paths carefully.
[tags]tomcat, windows service, java service wrapper[/tags]