How to add tomcat 8 into Intellij Idea?

Question

I've installed tomcat 8 by following tutorial:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-apache-tomcat-8-on-ubuntu-16-04

Now I need configure that tomcat into Intellij Idea. I'v add in Edit configurations new instance of tomcat and set up path to tomcat home, but when I confirm

/opt/tomcat

when my tomcat really is, I got this error:

I want check this folder in file explorer, but system alert me that I not have permission to view content of folders in /opt/tomcat. I think this cause also problem with tomcat configuration in Idea. What do you think? Can you help me to fix it please? Thanks.

Answer 1

It's indeed the problem that you don't have permissions to view the /opt/tomcat/*. This is because you've created a tomcat user and only gave that user the rights to view them. You're IntelliJ is running under your own user. To find out which user that is you can run whoami in your terminal.

If you execute the following commands, but with your own user instead of tomcat (replace the MY_USER) it should not give you the error message inside IntelliJ.

cd /opt/tomcat
sudo chgrp -R MY_USER /opt/tomcat
sudo chown -R MY_USER webapps/ work/ temp/ logs/

Keep in mind that the Tomcat user is created for security purposes though. That means that this solution of giving your super user the tomcat access is only good for local development.

Answer 2

Change

/opt/tomcat

to

/usr/share/tomcat

Works for me.