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I'm trying to set up Apache Tomcat on my pc, and it wants me to set up an environment variable for CATALINA_HOME. Does any know how to do this?

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3 Answers

up vote 14 down vote accepted

In bash you can set variables like this:

export CATALINA_HOME=/opt/catalina

most other shells follow this convention, but not all. You can set it permanently in ~/.profile for bash (and as before, other shells have other locations)

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for session-wide variables, help.ubuntu.com recommends ~/.profile as probably the best file for placing environment variable assignments in, since it gets executed automatically by the DisplayManager during the startup process desktop session as well as by the login shell when one logs-in from the textual console. – McDowell Aug 4 '10 at 21:49
Updated the answer. The reason why i used .bashrc instead was that at some point .profile wasn't sourced automatically. But if it works now, it's better to use it. – Ressu Aug 5 '10 at 5:07
Setting it in ~/.profile doesn't work for me. It works in ~/.bashrc though. – jumpnett Aug 7 '10 at 0:56
Setting it in ~/.bash_profile works as well. – jumpnett Jan 31 at 0:45
up vote 7 down vote

Environment variables should already work

If you are using the tomcat6 package from the Ubuntu repositories, then the CATALINA_HOME and other environment variables are already set, in the /etc/init.d/tomcat6 startup script.

If you are installing tomcat outside the package manager (hopefully in /opt or somewhere else outside the managed file system), then running the TOMCAT/bin/startup.sh should use the relative location to define the CATALINA_HOME.

Setting the Environment variable

If for some reason you still need to set an environment variable you can open a terminal window and type in the command:

export CATALINA_HOME=/path/to/the/root/folder/of/tomcat

This environment variable will now work within that terminal window, but if you open another window or logout/login you loose that setting.

Make the environment variable permanent

To make the environment variable setting permanent, there are several places you can define the setting.

To be really sure the setting is being picked up, add the above setting to one of the startup script for tomcat:

yourtomcatfolder/bin/startup.sh

yourtomcatfolder/bin/catalina.sh

Note: startup.sh calls the catalina.sh. You should add the setting at the start of one of these files (after any initial comments)

The standard way for global environment variables would be to add an entry in /etc/environment (you do not use the command export in this file as it is not a normal bash script)

CATALINA_HOME=/path/to/the/root/folder/of/tomcat

Not recommended

You can set the environment variables in the bash (command line shell) configuration files, but these are not recommended as they are not always picked up (eg. if you are running a server that you dont login to to run tomcat): ~/.bashrc | ~/.profile | /etc.bash.bashrc | /etc/profile

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up vote 3 down vote

The best place for this depends on how and where you've installed Tomcat, what applications you want to pick up this setting and how global you want the scope to be.

The Ubuntu documentation on Environment Variables discusses the pros and cons of the various options.

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What are you referring to when you say, "best place for this"? – jumpnett Aug 3 '10 at 22:58
@jumpnett - I mean where to make the setting persistent so that it is always available to the applications depending on it. Unless you're happy typing the setting in every time or want to write your own script. – McDowell Aug 4 '10 at 21:44

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