I've just finished building up a couple production servers to host web applications. The servers are Xen guests on an AMD Quad-Core Opteron x86_64 host. The VPS template is a minimal installation of CentOS, to which I added packages as needed. The release of Sun Java 1.6u12 came out just as I was writing this, so these instructions will need to get updated slightly when JPackage has a new RPM (more on that later). Both Matt Woodward and Dave Shuck recently wrote about configuring CFML engines with Tomcat. The installation I'll describe is somewhat similar.
- CentOS 5.2
- Tomcat 5.5.23 (tomcat5-5.5.23-0jpp.7.el5_2.1)
- Apache 2.2 (httpd-2.2.3-11.el5_2.centos.4)
- Sun Java 1.6u11 (java-1.6.0-sun-1.6.0.11-1jpp)
- Sun JavaMail 1.4.1
- Open BlueDragon 1.0.1
The installation of packages using yum is a snap, however there was an issue with the architecture detection. There is a simple workaround, to hard-code i386 as the basearch:
sed -i -r 's/\$basearch/i386/g' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo
The procedure is to install jpackage-utils, then download and repackage the Sun Java SE Development Kit 6 (jdk 1.6) using the JPackage Project non-free nosrc RPM. I install some, but not all of the, resulting RPMs:
yum --nogpgcheck localinstall java-1.6.0-sun-1.6.0.11-1jpp.i586.rpm java-1.6.0-sun-devel-* java-1.6.0-sun-fonts-*
The CentOS Wiki has a thorough article on installing Java on CentOS. I've considered using OpenJDK, but I don't know what sort of compatibility issues that would raise.
The Tomcat server starts up just fine with GNU's version of the Java runtime (libgcj and java-1.4.2-gcj-compat). However, using the GNU version of JavaMail (classpathx-mail) instead of Sun JavaMail, the following chunk of CFML will fail with a javax.mail.NoSuchProviderException exception from within the Open BlueDragon web application:
<cfscript>
server = "localhost";
port = 25;
username = "";
password = "";
mailSession = createObject("java", "javax.mail.Session").getDefaultInstance(createObject("java", "java.util.Properties").init());
transport = mailSession.getTransport("smtp");
transport.connect(server, JavaCast("int", port), username, password);
transport.close();
</cfscript>
Open BlueDragon does include include the correct Jar, but the JVM that Tomcat configures loads the system version first. Rather that muck about with the classpaths, I downloaded the current version of JavaMail, extracted mail.jar, and created alternatives link:
unzip -j -d /tmp javamail-1_4_1.zip javamail-1.4.1/mail.jar
mv /tmp/mail.jar /usr/share/java/javamail-1.4.1.jar
alternatives --install /usr/share/java/javamail.jar javamail /usr/share/java/javamail-1.4.1.jar 5000
alternatives --auto javamail
file /var/lib/tomcat5/common/lib/\[javamail\].jar
Tomcat installs a set of symlinks to /usr/share/tomcat5. Configuration files are placed in /etc/tomcat5. For this installation, I use a stripped-down version of server.xml that provides web application hosting on a per-user basis.
<Server port="8005" shutdown="SHUTDOWN">
<GlobalNamingResources />
<Service name="Catalina">
<Connector port="8080" address="127.0.0.1" protocol="HTTP/1.1" />
<Connector port="8009" address="127.0.0.1" protocol="AJP/1.3" />
<Engine name="Catalina" defaultHost="localhost">
<Host name="localhost" appBase="webapps" unpackWARs="true" autoDeploy="true" debug="0" />
<Host name="localhost-username" appBase="/home/username/webapps" unpackWARs="false" autoDeploy="false" debug="1">
<Context path="" docBase="openbd" allowLinking="true" caseSensitive="true" swallowOutput="true" />
</Host>
</Engine>
</Service>
</Server>
The standard Tomcat configuration has a single Host within an Engine named Catalina. I've added a second Host that is specific to a system user username, which allows each user on the system to manage their own deployed web applications and choose their own root Context. Installing Open BlueDragon as the default web application simplifies the Apache HTTP configuration.
The username user has an Apache HTTP configuration file in /etc/httpd/conf.d/username.conf with mod_rewrite rules to proxy all requests for CFML files to the Tomcat HTTP Connector. I had intended to use the AJP Connector with mod_proxy_ajp, but there is a problem with the the proxy request not specifying the proper hostname. There might be a solution to that issue, but I haven't found it yet. The plain mod_proxy_http module works properly in the following configuration:
<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot /home/username/websites/sitename
...
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} \.cfm$
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://localhost-username:8080/$1 [P]
</VirtualHost>
The rest of the Apache HTTP configuration handles web requests for flat files, served from ~/websites/sitename. The CFML files can be placed in ~/webapps/openbd, however an easier deployment is to place everything in ~/websites/sitename (like you would with a typical ColdFusion server). Symbolic links can be added for directories containing CFML. Consider the following:
cd ~/webapps/openbd
ln -s ../../websites/sitename/MachII MachII
It would probably be a good idea to set the Open BlueDragon root mapping appropriately. There are a few issues with file ownership and permissions that I didn't address above. I've added username to the /etc/sudoers file, granting that user limited access.
