Error registering a Tomcat 7 server in Netbeans 7 (Catalina Home folder is not valid)

Question

I'm running Netbeans 7.0.1 on Linux Mint DE. Netbeans was installed through the distro's repositories. I've now installed the package tomcat7-user so I can create a user instance of Tomcat which I can start or stop as required. When I start this instance (using bin/startup.sh) the script reports:

Using CATALINA_BASE:   /home/david/tomcat
Using CATALINA_HOME:   /usr/share/tomcat7
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /home/david/tomcat/temp
Using JRE_HOME:        /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
Using CLASSPATH:       /usr/share/tomcat7/bin/bootstrap.jar:/usr/share/tomcat7/bin/tomcat-juli.jar
Tomcat started

So, in Netbeans, I go to Tools -> Servers, click Add Server, select Apache Tomcat, click next and in the Server Location (Catalina Home) field I put /usr/share/tomcat7. But Netbeans reports:

The specified Server Location (Catalina Home) folder is not valid.

I thought perhaps it's a permissions issue so I (temporarily) chmoded everything in /usr/share/tomcat7 (including that folder itself) to 0777 but still that error message appears. So my next thought is maybe there's something missing, so I symlinked all of the folders in Catalina base into Catalina home, but still no luck.

Now it would be very helpful if Netbeans actually told you not just that a problem exists, but what the problem actually is, too. I'm quite close to going through the Netbeans source code to find out what it actually wants, but if anyone could shed some light on this for me that would save me an awful lot of fuss!

Answer 1

Okay, in the absence of anything sensible anywhere on the net, I downloaded the Netbeans source code this weekend and found out the hard way.

For some reason, Netbeans thinks I have an old version of Tomcat, so it's looking for the ${CATALINA_HOME}/common/lib folder. The following terminal commands fixed the problem:

cd /usr/share/tomcat7
sudo mkdir common
sudo ln -s lib common/lib