Tomcat doesn't work with Eclipse

[John]

In order to get tomcat to work with Eclipse you need to do the following which will keeps the system tomcat and your own personal development tomcat instance separate.

Install tomcat as per normal: sudo apt-get install tomcat7

Install private instance support: sudo apt-get install tomcat7-user

Create local instance in your home folder:

tomcat7-instance-create -p 10080 -c 10005 mytomcat

Note: -p sets the port number (default is 8080) and -c is the control port (default 8005), we set these so we don't compete with the main installation of tomcat running as a service. "mytomcat" can be anything you like, but it will create a directory by this name in your home.

Now use the following to make Eclipse happy (this should be done by tomcat7-instance-create):

cd mytomcat
ln -s /usr/share/tomcat7/lib
ln -s /etc/tomcat7/policy.d/03catalina.policy conf/catalina.policy
ln -s /usr/share/tomcat7/bin/bootstrap.jar bin/bootstrap.jar
ln -s /usr/share/tomcat7/bin/tomcat-juli.jar bin/tomcat-juli.jar
mkdir -p common/classes;
mkdir -p server/classes;
mkdir -p shared/classes;

Now within Eclipse you can create a Tomcat v7.0 server and set the installation directory as ~/mytomcat.

Note: common, server and shared classes could be links too, but I wanted to keep the two separate.