Starting Tomcat as a Service on Linux

If you only download the comcat zip/tar, use following step to operate the tomcat as a service 

1 Create /etc/rc.d/init.d/tomcat :

#!/bin/sh
#
# /etc/init.d/tomcat
#
# This is the init script for starting up the
#  Jakarta Tomcat server
#
# description: Starts and stops the Tomcat daemon.
#

tomcat=YOUR_TOMCAT_PATH
startup=$tomcat/bin/startup.sh
shutdown=$tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh

start() {
  echo -n {1}quot;Starting Tomcat service: "
  sh $startup
  echo $?
}

stop() {
  echo -n {1}quot;Stopping Tomcat service: "
  sh $shutdown
  echo $?
}

restart() {
  stop
  start
}

status() {
  ps -aef | grep apache-tomcat | grep -v tomcat6 | grep -v grep
}

# Handle the different input options
case "$1" in
start)
  start
  ;;
stop)
  stop
  ;;
status)
  status
  ;;
restart)
  restart
  ;;
*)
  echo {1}quot;Usage: $0 {start|stop|restart|status}"
  exit 1
esac

exit 0

Edit the lines that start with tomcat and export to match where you installed tomcat and your jdk.

Note: I can't remember where I first got the original version of this script so if you deserve credit for this, let us know.

2. Add execute access to the script, so run:

chmod a+x tomcat

3. Add to appropriate run level directories

chkconfig --add tomcat

4. Restart linux and use the following command to start/restart/stop the tomcat

service tomcat start
service tomcat restart
service tomcat stop