How to make Tomcat automatically start when system boots

By default, Tomcat server won't automatically start when system boots in most hosting services (actually, by default Tomcat is not installed in most cases.) This means your website is not available if for any reason the machine restarts.

To make Tomcat automatically start when system boots, you can add Tomcat as a service with the following steps (Assume you have Linux machine):

Step 1: add a script using command "sudo vi /etc/init.d/tomcat"

paste the following content into the file:

# Tomcat auto-start
# description: Auto-starts tomcat
# processname: tomcat
# pidfile: /var/run/tomcat.pid

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

case $1 in
start)
sh /usr/local/tomcat/bin/startup.sh
;;
stop)
sh /usr/local/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh
;;
restart)
sh /usr/local/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh
sh /usr/local/tomcat/bin/startup.sh
;;
esac
exit 0

In this example, we assume the java path is /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun and tomcat path is /usr/local/tomcat.

Step 2: make the script executable by running the chmod command:

sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/tomcat

Step 3: link this script to the startup folders by running the following commands

sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/tomcat /etc/rc1.d/K99tomcat
sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/tomcat /etc/rc2.d/S99tomcat
sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/tomcat /etc/rc3.d/K04tomcat
sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/tomcat /etc/rc3.d/S98tomcat
chkconfig --level 2345 tomcat on

Now, Tomcat has been set as auto-starting for system restart.