How do I start Tomcat on boot without having to provide a root password?

Question

I have Tomcat set up to launch at start up on my Ubuntu box. Trouble is, I have to manually supply a root password on each boot. Is it possible for this to be automated? Do I just supply an command parm? If so, what is the syntax? Thank you!

Answer 1

I'm unsure about how you have pulled this off, but it does sound like you have tomcat start up when you login rather than when the machine boots. Am i right?

Anyway, you should have it start when it boots. The following procedures should be done as root. When in use, init will do them as root.

The quick and dirty way:

Given that your start script is "/usr/local/tomcat/bin/startup.sh" the just add that line to the file /etc/rc.local and reboot.

The right way:

Make an upstart script. I haven't really done that before, but I saw this: https://gist.github.com/2924017 which might work. Put the file (tomcat.conf) in /etc/init/ and reboot.

As a service, you can start, stop, restart and get status on services by doing:

start tomcat
stop tomcat
restart tomcat
status tomcat

This is of course how all services in Ubuntu behave. (gdm, apache, ssh, etc..)

Hope it helps :)