The /var/lib/tomcat5.5/conf/Catalina folder must have write access for tomcat5 user

[Nicolas Ternisien]

This folder is automatically updated by the Tomcat process when a WAR file is deployed.

Indeed, most WAR files provides a META-INF/ folder, which contains a context.xml file, which is automatically copied in the conf/Catalina/<hostname>/ folder, and renamed, to match the application name.

This is the cause of many troubles when deploying web applications

A

chown -R tomcat5.nogroup /var/lib/tomcat5.5/conf/Catalina

should be sufficent

[Nicolas Ternisien (nicolas-ternisien)]

These rights must also be given to the /var/lib/tomcat5.5/webapps folder, to let Tomcat be able to undeploy and deploy easily web application from the manager application.

This is the standard work process for a Tomcat server, so it should not be a problem to enabled this on Ubuntu packages.

[Nicolas Ternisien (nicolas-ternisien)]

When I talk about /var/lib/tomcat5.5/webapps folder, I also mean webapps/ subdirectories, which are own by root by default (balancer, jsp-examples, servlets-examples, tomcat-docs, webdav,...)

so a

chown -R tomcat5.nogroup /var/lib/tomcat5.5/webapps

should be good.

[Matti Lindell (mlind)]

This is fixed since Feisty

tomcat5.5 (5.5.20-4) unstable; urgency=low
  .
  * The tomcat55 user now has write permissions to
    "/var/lib/tomcat5.5/conf", so that Tomcat can deploy webapps in WAR
    archives. (Closes: #402224)

You should request a backport if you need it for earlier release.

[Nicolas Ternisien (nicolas-ternisien)]

No, a backport will not be needed, I will upgrade my server soon, but thanks for the information.