How to start Tomcat with output on console in Linux?

Question

I know it's possible to start tomcat and then run tail -f catalina.out to view Tomcat output. But how to run tomcat and view output at once? Are there some options to run startup.sh with?

Solution 1

You're looking for

tomcat/bin/catalina.sh run

instead of

tomcat/bin/startup.sh; tail -f tomcat/logs/catalina.out

Tomcat stays in foreground this way (first option). If you want to shut it down, Ctrl-C in your console window will do the trick.

If you choose the second option, tomcat will run in background, while tail will run in foreground, but you'll have to give the same directory path twice.

Solution 2

Instead of using service, cd to Tomcat's bin directory, type ./startup.sh. This will start Tomcat in console.

All the logs that goes to catalina.out you can modify it by this link : Tomcat logging

Comments

[Aniket Thakur]

You need to do ./catalina.sh run. If you view usage of catalina.sh you will see run -> Start Catalina in the current window.

[Jaime Hablutzel]

Isn't it possible to move this question to serverfault.com?.

[Jaime Hablutzel]

For Linux distributions where catalina.sh is not available after installing Tomcat from a package, something like the following could work: sudo -u tomcat /usr/libexec/tomcat/server start (tested in Amazon Linux 2 with tomcat8 package installed).

[Sridhar Sarnobat]

interesting, it mirrors Java's Thread.start() vs Thread.run() which I also used to confuse.