tomcat startup.sh trouble finding JAVA_HOME

Question

I am a bit puzzled by this strange behavior on CentOs 5.4 when starting Tomcat 6.0 as a service

I've added a script at /etc/init.d/tomcat that can start/stop/restart Apache Tomcat 6.0 with user 'tomcat', and registered it as service. The problem with the service is that I am getting a 'Neither the JAVA_HOME nor the JRE_HOME environment variable is defined'. But when type 'sudo -u tomcat echo $JAVA_HOME' I get '/usr/java/jdk1.5.0_22' which is correct since I am using that JDK. What can I do about this?

Answer 1

I had the same issue and solved it by placing the JAVA_HOME variable definition on file /etc/environment.

Initially I had created the JAVA_HOME environment variable invoking:

$ export JAVA_HOME=<path_to_my_java_home>

Then I realized Tomcat startup.sh script could not access the value of the JAVA_HOME variable when it was invoked with sudo, which is necessary to start Tomcat server.

First I tried exporting the JAVA_HOME variable with sudo, but it did not work:

$ sudo export JAVA_HOME=<path_to_my_java_home>
sudo: export: command not found

Then I tried adding the JAVA_HOME variable definition to /etc/environment file. Here is how my /etc/enviroment file looks like now:

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games"
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-7-oracle

Then after invoking Tomcat startup.sh script with sudo and accessing http://localhost:8080 the brownser brings Tomcat startup page, which states the server is setup successfully.

Answer 2

Have you tried forcing the JAVA_HOME env variable into the start script itself? Whenever I face a problem like this I find it a good troubleshooting technique to try and track down where it is losing this info by setting it in the scripts themselves.