Getting the Tomcat server running on our Alpine Linux virtual machine.

Welcome back to another tutorial from our Alpine Linux explorations tutorial series.

This time we are going to get our very own Tomcat web server running on our Alpine Linux virtual machine.

 We need to complete several steps to get it working correctly.

 1. We need to power on our Alpine Linux virtual machine from the Oracle Virtual Box Manager.

2. Once our Alpine Linux virtual machine execution environment has fully booted we are ready to begin the process – system ready.

3. We need to open the Linux Terminal.

4. We need to switch to the root user to run the necessary commands to install the Tomcat server correctly. 

5. We first need to update our Alpine Linux virtual machine execution environment. First, run the command ‘apk update’.

6. We then need to run the command ‘apk upgrade’.

7. Now the Alpine Linux virtual machine execution environment is fully updated. 

8. We need to run the command ‘reboot’.

9. Now we need to log back in, open the Linux Terminal again and switch to the root account. Now we can add the Tomcat web server packages and we need to install the necessary Java packages as well.

 For the Java packages, we need to run the following Linux terminal command “apk add openjdk11” and we need to check if it is correctly installed by using the command “java –version”.

 10. We can then proceed to search for the correct Tomcat server packages and install them using this Linux terminal command “apk search tomcat”.

Then we install the packages with these commands:

 “apk add tomcat-native tomcat9 tomcat9-admin tomcat9-examples tomcat9-openrc”

11. We can then start the Tomcat server using the Linux terminal command “service tomcat9 start”.

We can also shut it down using the command “service tomcat9 stop”.

 12. Here we can see that I have made a mistake. I should have opted for another Java version.

 We can see here that I need a more recent version of Java to properly run this server. My bad :)

 Now we shall upgrade our Java environment version. 

 Sweet victory! Now we have completed our work.

Finally, we should make use of the openrc framework to allow our newly installed Tomcat server to load automatically every time we boot our Alpine Linux virtual machine.  

The command is "rc-update add tomcat default".

Now we have fully completed our great work. We can shut down the Alpine Linux Virtual machine. 

For this purpose, we need to use the Linux terminal command “poweroff”.

 Well, that was fun. See you next time! #linux