Tomcat – Restart tomcat using gitlab-runner

The exact reason of why Tomcat cannot read the directories as in approach 1 and 3 are still unknown to me. However, it seems impossible for Tomcat to use any directory located under /home/user/... as a webapp, even if this means using symlinks to link to this location and setting correct permissions on the directories!

Although probably this is some kind of built-in protection. It is still strange because this behaviour is not listed in the Apache Tomcat documentation (correct me if I'm wrong).

The solution is therefore to use any other directory than /home/user/..., e.g. /usr/share/tomcat7/projects should work. But then again, it is best to set my Netbeans distribution output to the webapps directory directly as mentioned by another person (@user208992).

So in order to fix this problem, here is a list of instructions necessary to make Tomcat work with Netbeans using an external build/dist directory:

1. Configure Netbeans to distribute the build and dist directories to a directory outside of /home/user/NetbeansProjects/project.

   Edit the following file: /home/user/NetbeansProjects/project/nbproject/project.properties, and change the lines:

   build.dir=build
   dist.dir=dist
   

   to

   build.dir=/srv/tomcat/project/build
   dist.dir=/srv/tomcat/project/dist
   

   Note that you can use any directory (other than /home/...) instead of /srv/tomcat/project

2. Add a Context with a proper docBase to the Tomcat host.

   One way to do this is to edit the server.xml configuration file probably located in /etc/tomcat7/server.xml. Add a Context in the server.xml file:

   <Context docBase="/srv/tomcat/project/build/web/" path="/project"></Context>
   

   Make sure to place this within the <Host>-tag. Also you can add attributes to this tag when needed (reloadable, antiJARLocking etc). Or you could also place in xml file in CATALINA_HOME/engine(e.g. Catalina)/hostname(e.g. localhost)/project.xml, one of these approaches will be okay.

   I choose to point the docBase to .../build/web/ but you could also set this to .../dist/ if you want Tomcat to use the WAR-file.

3. Make sure tomcat is in the same users-group as you are. To do this, e.g.:

   usermod --append --groups users tomcat7
   

   Note: Any common group you have with tomcat will suffice. This way Netbeans and Tomcat can both access the same directory.

4. Fix ownership and permissions of the external project directory.

   sudo chown -R tomcat7:users /srv/tomcat/project
   sudo chmod -R 777 /srv/tomcat/project
   

   This assumes that you user are member of the group users, and tomcat7 is the name of tomcats user. You can check this incat /etc/passwd`.

   Note: Later on you can reduce the 777-permissions, but to make sure to let Tomcat have permissions you can start with the most accessible permissions.

5. Do clean/build in Netbeans, and restart tomcat service. This will apply the changes from the previous steps.

I hope this will be helpful to somebody dealing with a similar situation; Tomcat and permissions can be really hard to debug imho.

I finally figured out a solution that works.

For the problem of not showing the environment variables I refer to this: https://bz.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=37848 The gitlab-runner has no tty, so no output is shown.

The cause of the malfunctioning start is the following: Looking into the source code of the gitlab-runner you can find this: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi-runner/blob/master/executors/shell/executor_shell.go#L84

Basically as soon as the gitlab-runner finishes it kills all its remaining processes. That means in my case the server was actually running for a short amount of time before the process got killed. That's why I got empty log files.

I solved the problem by simply writing an init script to start and shutdown tomcat. The tomcat now has its own user (and group). Now the tomcat process tree is initiated by /sbin/init. Now gitlab-runner is not aware of this process anymore or not able to kill it. Either way the tomcat keeps running after the runner stops.