catalina.properties points to wrong location for shared libraries and classes

[Lucas Madar]

By default, catalina.home points to /usr/share/tomcat7 and catalina.base points to /var/lib/tomcat7.

catalina.properties sets classloader paths:
common.loader=${catalina.base}/lib,${catalina.base}/lib/*.jar,${catalina.home}/lib,${catalina.home}/lib/*.jar,${catalina.home}/common/classes,${catalina.home}/common/*.jar
server.loader=${catalina.home}/server/classes,${catalina.home}/server/*.jar
shared.loader=${catalina.home}/shared/classes,${catalina.home}/shared/*.jar

However, the directory structure of shared/, shared/classes/, server/, server/classes/, common/ and common/classes/ all exist under /var/lib/tomcat7 (catalina.base), not /usr/share/tomcat7 (catalina.home).

Thus, any files placed into these directories are ignored.

[Ian Robertson (ian-b-robertson)]

It seems the problem is in debian/patches/0006-add-JARs-below-var-to-class-loader.patch. A patch for this patch is attached.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Tim Donohue (tdonohue)]

This ticket seems to be a duplicate of
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tomcat7/+bug/1232258

The #1232258 ticket suggests instead that symlinks be created to resolve this problem. Unfortunately, simply changing the "${catalina.home}" settings in the catalina.properties file(s) to "${catalina.base}" won't work in all scenarios.

A good example is when you use the "tomcat7-user" package to install multiple instances of Tomcat under different user accounts. In this scenario, ${catalina.base} would point at the Tomcat user account installation (which would NOT include these various common directories by default), while ${catalina.home} would still point at /usr/share/tomcat7/