MMBase installation on Apache Tomcat

This document applies to MMBase 1.7 and Tomcat 4.1.12 (or higher). In earlier Tomcat 4.1 versions are bugs which make some MMBase jsp-pages not even compile. The taglib implementation of Tomcat 4.0 is very slow, so we strongly advice to go for the latest Tomcat 4.1 or 5.0 version.

This installation procedure was tested on a Debian/GNU Linux system (with sun jdk in /usr/local), other Unixes must be very similar, and for those systems I have good hopes, but did not test (yet).

So download a binary Tomcat 4.1 or 5.0, and install it (i.e. unpack it somewhere). You also need jdk 1.4 installed (think of the JAVA_HOME environment variable if necessary). MMBase 1.6.5 was available for both jdk 1.3 and 1.4, but the 1.7 release of MMBase requires jdk 1.4. Make sure the current working directory and the 'conf', 'logs', 'temp' and 'work' of the tomcat installation are writable for the user who is going to run it (and the rest is readable at least)

Run Tomcat with one of the scripts of its 'bin' directory ('catalina.sh run' e.g.). Before trying to install MMBase make sure that tomcat is working (surf to http://localhost:8080 and try some jsp examples). Don't proceed until all problems which might occur related to the Tomcat installation are solved.

Download or generate an MMBase 'binary' distro and unpack it (it is distributed as a zip). You find a directory 'mmbase-webapp' and remember its location.

MMBase still uses some Xerces specific XML parsing functionality, which is not compatible with the Xerces version of Tomcat. So, in the tomcat directory common/endorsed remove 'xercesImpl.jar' and 'xmlParserAPI.jar', and move 'xalan.jar' 'xerces.jar' and 'xml-apis.jar' from mmbase-webapp/WEB-INF/lib to their place. You have to move them, because letting them on two place can give class-loader problems.

To 'server.xml' of Tomcat's 'conf' directory add the following:

<Context path="/mm" docBase="/home/michiel/mmbase/1.6/mmbase/build/mmbase/mmbase-webapp" debug="0" allowLinking="true">
	<!-- if you want symlinks to work in tomcat4: -->
	<Resources className="org.apache.naming.resources.FileDirContext" allowLinking="true" />
</Context>

A complete server.xml might look like this then.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Server port="8889" shutdown="SHUTDOWN" debug="0">
	<Service name="Tomcat-Standalone-MMBase">
		<Connector 
			port="8070"
			address="michiel.omroep.nl"
			minProcessors="5" maxProcessors="75"
			enableLookups="false"
			redirectPort="8443"
			acceptCount="10"
			debug="0"
			connectionTimeout="60000"
			proxyPort="80"
			proxyName="michiel.omroep.nl"
		/>
		<Engine name="Standalone" defaultHost="localhost" debug="0">
			<Logger className="org.apache.catalina.logger.FileLogger"
				directory="log"
				prefix="catalina."
				suffix=".log"
				timestamp="true"
				/>
			<Host name="localhost" debug="0" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true">
				<Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve"
					directory="log"
					prefix="access."
					suffix=".log"
					pattern="common"
				/>
				<Logger className="org.apache.catalina.logger.FileLogger"
					directory="log"
					prefix="tomcat."
					suffix=".log"
					timestamp="false"
				/>
				<Context path="/mm" docBase="/home/michiel/mmbase/1.6/mmbase/build/mmbase/mmbase-webapp" debug="0" allowLinking="true">
					<Resources className="org.apache.naming.resources.FileDirContext" allowLinking="true" /><!-- only for tomcat 4 -->
					<Resource name="mail/Session" auth="Container" type="javax.mail.Session"/>
					<ResourceParams name="mail/Session">
						<parameter>
							<name>mail.smtp.host</name>
							<value>localhost</value>
						</parameter>
					</ResourceParams>
				</Context>
			</Host>
		</Engine>
	</Service>
</Server>

Follow the instructions of the introduction page of MMBase. Deploy some example applications and so on.

If you want image-conversion in MMBase to work, make sure to install ImageMagick and be sure that the 'convert' program is in the PATH when you start Tomcat. Alternatively you can edit the images.xml builder definition to specify its location (search for images.xml in mmbase-webapp/WEB-INF/config/)

For a real installation you want to at least use another database (default MMBase is using hsql). See the configuration documentation.