Installation Guide

Red Hat JBoss Web Server is a fully integrated and certified set of components for hosting Java web applications. It consists of the following components:

Red Hat JBoss Web Server supports the following operating systems and configurations.

You can install JBoss Web Server on supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows systems using archive installation files available for each platform. You can also install JBoss Web Server on supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems using RPM packages.

The following components are included in the archive installation files. These components are the core parts of a JBoss Web Server installation.

JBoss Web Server includes an additional documentation bundle that includes the original vendor documentation for each component. This documentation bundle, jws-docs-5.4.0.zip, is available at the Red Hat Customer Portal, and contains additional documentation for the following components:

You can install JBoss Web Server from an archive file. Installation from an archive results in different methods of managing the product compared to installation from an RPM package. For example, you can use a system daemon at boot time and manage JBoss Web Server from a command line. Start by downloading and extracting the archive file.

# cd JWS_HOME/tomcat
# sh .postinstall.systemd

$ sh JWS_HOME/tomcat/bin/startup.sh

$ sh JWS_HOME/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh

Installing JBoss Web Server from RPM packages installs Tomcat as service, and installs its resources into absolute paths. The RPM installation option is available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.

RPM installation packages for JBoss Web Server are available from Red Hat Subscription Management.

Before installing JBoss Web Server on Microsoft Windows, you must first install a supported Java Development Kit (JDK).

For a list of supported configurations, see the Supporting Operating Systems and Configurations.

To install the Oracle Java Development Kit:

To install JBoss Web Server, download and extract the installation archive files.

The directory created by extracting the archives is the top-level directory for JBoss Web Server. This is referred to as JWS_HOME.

Some configuration is required before running JBoss Web Server. This section includes the following configuration procedures:

You can start the JBoss Web Server from a command prompt, or with the Computer Management tool.

You can stop the JBoss Web Server from a command prompt, or with the Computer Management tool.

Complete the following procedure to install Hibernate ORM on all platforms that JBoss Web Server supports.

Tomcat provides a default connection pooling mechanism for JDBC datasources.

Configure Hibernate to use connections from the Tomcat pool. If you use the Hibernate API directly, use a similar configuration to hibernate.cfg.xml.

Configure Tomcat to consume JDBC datasources.

Tomcat-vault is a PicketLink vault extension for Apache Tomcat that allows users to mask passwords and other sensitive strings, and store them in an encrypted Java keystore. Using the vault enables you to stop storing clear-text passwords in your Tomcat configuration files, because Tomcat can lookup passwords and other sensitive strings from a keystore using the vault.

As tomcat password vault is pre-installed by the jws-5.4.0-application-server.zip file. The password vault can be used once configured and it is located at: JWS_HOME/tomcat/lib/tomcat-vault.jar.

If the JBoss Web Server has been installed from RPMs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you need to install the JBoss Web Server RPM for tomcat-vault.

In the following procedure, replace JWS_HOME with the path to your JBoss Web Server installation. Also, the paths below use / for directory separators.

To use a password vault, you must first create a Java keystore.

The vault.properties file for the tomcat-vault can be stored outside of JWS_HOME/tomcat/conf/ in a CATALINA_BASE/conf/ directory (if set).

To set the CATALINA_BASE directory, follow the instructions in the section Advanced Configuration - Multiple Tomcat Instances in the Running The Apache Tomcat 9.0 Servlet/JSP Container document found on the Apache Tomcat Website.

The vault script used in the previous steps is also used to store sensitive strings in the password vault. The script can be run interactively or non-interactively.

When adding a string to a password vault, the sensitive string needs a name that it will be referred by. For a password vault, this name is called an attribute name, and the password itself is called a secured attribute.

The example below demonstrates using the vault script non-interactively to store a password. It uses the vault that was initialized in the previous steps, and stores the sensitive string P@SSW0#D with the attribute name manager_password.

$ JWS_HOME/tomcat/bin/tomcat-vault.sh --keystore JWS_HOME/tomcat/vault.keystore --keystore-password <vault_password> --alias my_vault --enc-dir JWS_HOME/tomcat --iteration 120 --salt 1234abcd --vault-block my_block --attribute manager_password --sec-attr P@SSW0#D

After storing a sensitive string in the password vault, you can refer to it in your configuration files by entering the stored string’s attribute as ${VAULT::block_name::attribute_name::}.

For example, to use the password stored in the previous steps, replace:

<user username="manager" password="P@SSW0#D" roles="manager-gui"/>

with:

<user username="manager" password="${VAULT::my_block::manager_password::}" roles="manager-gui"/>

As a result, only a reference to the password is visible in the Tomcat configuration file, and the actual password is only stored in the password vault.

SSI directives do not work if you try to configure SSI filter like you did in the previous versions.

    <mime-mapping>
        <extension>shtml</extension>
        <mime-type>text/x-server-parsed-html</mime-type>
    </mime-mapping>