What is the reason to use Tomcat as a Windows Service?

Question

I have been using Tomcat as a web container for a significant time period but I never come across a situation to use Tomcat as a Windows Service. So far I was thinking why Tomcat implementors provide a facility to run tomcat as Window Service.

1. What are the advantages we get by using Tomcat as a Windows Service rather than using startup.bat and shutdown.bat on the command line?

2. Is it really used in production environment?

Answer 1

Q1: You don't need to login into an active user session. Your server is up when the machine is up. You do not accidently stop the service by quitting a front process.

Q2: yes, on Windows Server products for shure.

Answer 2

If Tomcat is running as a service, you can ensure it restarts if the machine reboots unexpectedly for any reason; you can take actions if the service crashes; and you can run the service as a specified user fairly simply. If you run from the command line, you have none of these options.

Answer 3

Running Tomcat as a service that starts itself automatically on boot is the preferred way to run an application server in any environment: windows, Linux, unix.

The reason? You won't have to login to start application server manually if it is something that needs to be running all the time. As application servers usually do.

Answer 4

what are the advantage we can get by using Tomcat as a Windows Service?

You can set the service to start automatically when the PC is turned on. This is useful for servers where you want Tomcat to start again after a reboot or crash.

Does it really use in production environment ?

Yes, we always use that setting when we have to set up Windows servers.

On development machines, some people use it because it's convenient to start/stop Tomcat from the sys tray.