Setting up a Railo website in Ubuntu Apache Tomcat

If you have followed the instructions in the previous post then you hopefully have a working Railo server. Next step is to set up a website.

There are three main steps required

1) Add the site domain name to your hosts file

2) Add the site to apache

3) Add the site to tomcat

Let’s set up a Railo site at the address http://test.localhost

In these notes I am using the nano editor. If you are in a graphical environment then you can substitute all references to nano with gedit, which is a nice graphical editor.

Enable index.cfm as a default file in Apache

First let’s ensure that index.cfm is a default file in Apache.

httpd.conf is the place to put your custom configuration

sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Add in the text

DirectoryIndex index.cfm

Ctrl O, Enter – to Save

Ctrl X, Enter – to Exit

Update your hosts file

sudo nano /etc/hosts

Add in the line

127.0.0.1      test.localhost

Ctrl O, Enter – to Save

Ctrl X, Enter – to Exit

Create the new site

cd /var/www
sudo mkdir test
cd test
sudo nano index.cfm

Enter the text

<cfoutput>
The time is #now()#
</cfoutput>

Ctrl O, Enter – to Save

Ctrl X, Enter – to Exit

Add the site to Apache

cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
sudo nano test

Enter the following

<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName test.localhost
    DocumentRoot /var/www/test
</VirtualHost>

Ctrl O, Enter – to Save

Ctrl X, Enter – to Exit

Enable the site. The command a2ensite creates a link in the /etc/apache/sites-enabled directory.

sudo a2ensite test

Add the site to Tomcat

cd /opt/railo/tomcat/conf
sudo nano server.xml

Go to the very end of the file and enter the following just before the closing tag.

Notice that this is a copy of the commented out >Host< entry with the [ENTER DOMAIN NAME] and [ENTER SYSTEM PATH] completed.

<Host name="test.localhost" appBase="webapps"
        unpackWARS="true" autoDeploy="true"
        xmlValidation="false" xmlNamespaceAware="false">
        <Context path="" docBase="/var/www/test" />
</Host>

Ctrl O, Enter – to Save

Ctrl X, Enter – to Exit

Restart Apache and Railo

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
sudo /etc/init.d/railo_ctl restart

Check your site is working

Go to http://test.localhost