Tomcat / TomEE CLI frontend

• Overview
• Features
  • Wealth of commands
  • Multiple execution environments
  • Easily manage and view YAML-based change logs
• Installation
• Documentation

Overview

This repository contains a command line utility named tomcat which provides a single point of access to manage a Tomcat server and its configuration option. This utility can be used in lieu of the many *.sh files found in a standard Tomcat or TomEE distribution.

You will want to use this utility if you want to:

• have a single front-end utility to manage your Tomcat server
• configure multiple JDK/JRE Java environments
• manage multiple Tomcat runtime environments
• manage the update of your webapps
• regularly create snapshots of your Tomcat configuration
• support legacy Tomcat versions (e.g. Tomcat 6)

All that this utility requires are common POSIX commands, including a valid KornShell. This utility has dropped the support for Cygwin, OS400 and Windows, as available in standard Tomcat / TomEE distributions. The gold master is developped on macOS and production environments are run on Amazon Linux and CentOS; it is forseen that only minor adjustements may be required to operate this on other POSIX/UNIX or Linux distributions.

Note Though this utility was only committed to GitHub in August 2021, it has been used in production since 2012 and has been tested with various implementations of Tomcat and TomEE since Tomcat 6.0.29.

Features

This utility is currently customised for the SAMinfo ERP for which it is primarily intended. This can be easily changed by changing the tomcat_splash function and adjusting the custom settings in tomcat_config and tomcat_update.

Wealth of commands

Simply run the following command to list all available commands:

tomcat

Multiple execution environments

Environments are maintained in .env* files in the top level directory. Multiple such environments can be defined and easily listed with the command:

tomcat envs

Easily manage and view YAML-based change logs

To view the change log, simply issue the following command:

tomcat changelog

For the maintainer's convenience, the YAML file is maintained in reverse chronological order so that updates are done at the top of the file; however, when displayed, the entries are presented in chronological order, for the reader's convenience.

Likewise TODO items may be attached in the YAML file to each change date; however, when displayed, they will be grouped together and displayed last.

Important This feature currently requires the AIT framework and the glow utility. It is our intent to make this utility completely indenpendant of the AIT framework. This will be achieved in a subsequent update.

Installation

The repository structure should be kept as is; but can be located anywhere. By convention, we place it in /opt/tomcat-cli:

cd /opt; sudo git clone https://github.com/ISLECode/tomcat-cli

Then simply make a symbolic link to the bin/tomcat executable script into a PATH-aware directory, such as /usr/local/bin:

cd /usr/local/bin; ln -s /opt/tomcat-cli/bin/tomcat .

Documentation

The utility offers an extensive embarked man(1)-page which can be accessed as tomcat --man or tomcat COMMAND --man where COMMAND is a support command.