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Chapter 2. Migration From Base OS RHEL 7 Tomcat to JWS-5 Tomcat

For RHEL 8, Tomcat will be provided by the Red Hat JBoss Web Server team, where as previously it was provided by the Red Hat Enterprise Linux team. This section will cover the major differences between RHEL 7’s Tomcat package and the package provided by the JBoss Web Server project.

2.1. General Differences
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  • The package directories are all located within the SCL directories, i.e.: /opt/rh/jws5/root/usr/share/tomcat vs /usr/share/tomcat
  • The jws5-tomcat-webapps package doesn’t include the examples webapps, for security purposes
  • The jws5-tomcat-webapps package drops its dependency on jakarta-taglibs-standard which was needed by examples (not shipped).
  • The Tomcat version is Tomcat 9 instead of Tomcat 7. See the Tomcat Migration Guides for help migrating your Tomcat version.
  • The systemd service unit’s named changed from tomcat to jws5-tomcat, but functions the same.
  • The jws5-tomcat package increases the minor version of java required from version 7 to version 8.
  • The jws5-tomcat package drops the previous dependencies on apache-commons-daemon, apache-commons-logging, apache-commons-collections, apache-commons-pool, and apache-commons-dbcp.
  • The jws5-tomcat package drops jsvc support. *The jws5-tomcat package drops the RHEL ECJ version requirement and replaces it with a requirement for the jws5-ecj package (This is to get the minimum version required).
  • The jws5-tomcat package includes a new package jws5-tomcat-selinux which is not installed by default. This means selinux is NOT enabled by default.

2.2. Build Dependencies
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  • The jws5-tomcat package includes no patch files, it’s built from our own fork.
  • The jws5-tomcat package drops several build time dependencies while adding a few build dependencies from JBCS (these only matter if customers want to rebuild the RPM, which isn’t supported).
  • Access to use Tomcat-Native
  • Access to use Tomcat-Vault
  • Access to JBCS httpd, which is utilized as a load balancer for Tomcat
  • Access to use mod_cluster as a load balancer of httpd
  • Access to JWS zips to use instead of the RPM distribution, allows for running multiple instances of Tomcat.

2.4. Using Tomcat 9 From JWS-5 on RHEL
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Once you have the JWS/Runtimes SKU, then you can execute the commands given in the Managing JBoss Web Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux section of this installation guide.

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