Chapter 4. Starting Up Tomcat

In this chapter, we explore the process of starting up a Tomcat server.

In the course of our adventures, we've already seen two different ways of starting up Tomcat. In Chapter 1, we started a new build of Tomcat using the startup.bat script after a fresh Ant build of the Tomcat source, and we also started Tomcat from within the Eclipse IDE.

The former is how you will typically start Tomcat in a production environment, whereas the latter lets you start Tomcat in its dissected experimental form.

In this chapter, I'll present a quick overview of the script-based approach before getting down to the business of starting up Tomcat in the usual scenario that is dealt with in this book, where we have it lying cut open in our favorite development environment, and where we get to watch the process unfold before our eyes.

Using scripts

The Tomcat startup scripts are found within your project under the bin folder. Each script is available either as a Windows batch file (.bat...