tomcat7 webapp cannot create directories

Question

I've installed archlinux in the office for development. We use maven to deploy our application to tomcat. I have installed tomcat7.0.47. I've setup everything OK (I think) and I can deploy the webapp to tomcat using tomcat:redeploy. I can start, stop and restart tomcat using systemctl. The problem is tomcat cannot create (or even find) its log directories or create other directories. I know this is a file permission problem and I have done:

chown -R tomcat7:tomcat7

and

chmod -R 775

on /usr/share/tomcat7 and all the directories that are linked in this directory like /etc/tomcat7/, etc.

But still, when I redeploy to tomcat, I can't see the application start in firefox (I get 404) and catalina.out gives me

java.io.FileNotFoundException: logs/raven/org.ird.raven.2013-12-07.log (No such file or directory)

and systemctl status tomcat7 gives me:

tomcat7.service - Tomcat 7 servlet container
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/tomcat7.service; enabled)
Active: active (running) since Sat 2013-12-07 08:40:30 AFT; 15min ago
Process: 4453 ExecStart=/usr/bin/jsvc -Dcatalina.home=${CATALINA_HOME} -Dcatalina.base=${CATALINA_BASE} -Djava.io.tmpdir=/var/tmp/tomcat7/temp -cp /usr/share/java/commons-daemon.jar:/usr/share/java/eclipse-ecj.jar:${CATALINA_HOME}/bin/bootstrap.jar:${CATALINA_HOME}/bin/tomcat-juli.jar -user tomcat7 -java-home ${TOMCAT_JAVA_HOME} -pidfile /var/run/tomcat7.pid -errfile /var/log/tomcat7/catalina.err -outfile /var/log/tomcat7/catalina.out $CATALINA_OPTS org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
Main PID: 4457 (jsvc)
CGroup: /system.slice/tomcat7.service
       ├─4456 jsvc.exec -Dcatalina.home=/usr/share/tomcat7 -Dcatalina.base=/usr/share/tomcat7 -Djava.io.tmpdir=/var/tmp/tomcat7/temp -cp /usr/share/java/commons-daemon.ja...
       └─4457 jsvc.exec -Dcatalina.home=/usr/share/tomcat7 -Dcatalina.base=/usr/share/tomcat7 -Djava.io.tmpdir=/var/tmp/tomcat7/temp -cp /usr/share/java/commons-daemon.ja...

Dec 07 08:40:30 archbase systemd[1]: tomcat7.service: Supervising process 4457 which is not our child. We'll most likely not notice when it exits.
Dec 07 08:40:30 archbase systemd[1]: Started Tomcat 7 servlet container.

Right after I changed the file permissions, I got something like:

systemctl status tomcat7
PID file /var/run/tomcat7.pid not readable (yet?) after start.

What do I have to do to make this work. I really like to work on Arch. It's fast and simple (after you set it up). Can anyone help me please?

By the way, I was first working on a Windows 7 and then I went to OpenSuse and now I want to set up an Arch.

Answer 1

Yes, chmod on files owned by packages are bad practice because these rights are set by packagers on purpose. The pid not readable (yet?) after start is most probably due to the chmod. I would recommend using pacman -Rs tomcat7, removing or making a backup of your exploded war from /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps and finaly reinstalling Tomcat 7 with pacman -S tomcat7 to start with a fresh install.

As for your original question, Tomcat can find and write its directory/log but it seems your webapp or one of its dependency API cannot. You should have a look at where this logs/raven/org.ird.raven.2013-12-07.log is set to be created and perhaps create its directory hierarchy where it is supposed to be.

You can double check Tomcat has the expected rights on directories by issuing su tomcat7 -c "ls $DIR" or su tomcat7 -c "mkdir $DIR.

Answer 2

After a year of using Arch Linux, I now know a lot about it than I knew when I first asked this question. @galaux's answer is still valid and correct but I want to make sure any one else who reads this question has a straight answer and spends less time on fixing this problem. If the webapp you have deployed to tomcat cannot write logs to the system then change the destination of the logs in your webapp to a place on the system that tomcat can write to. Also make sure you have specified the absolute location. There are two places on arch linux (and other linux distros as far as I have encountered) that tomcat has the right to write into:

1. /var/log/tomcat7
2. /tmp

You can do this for other purposes too. For example my webapp saves user photos on the system. On the production server the location for that is something like /vault/raven but on my work machine, I have set it to /tmp/vault. This has the benefit of being deployable anywhere. I mean I can just start working on any other machine right away without worrying about creating directories for my webapp. Yet again if you don't want to do that, you can do like I did when I first solved this problem. There may be downsides to this but it's a quick solution. Just go to the service file that runs tomcat. In archlinux, it is in /usr/lib/systemd/system/tomcat7.service and replace -user tomcat7 with -user root. Once you do a systemctl daemon-reload and systemctl restart tomcat7, your tomcat should create the directories itself. Then change the user back to tomcat7 and make tomcat7 the owner of those directories and restart tomcat.