Burningice

Prepare Grails hosting: Apache + Tomcat

My last weekend I spent fighting with my VPS, try to configure it to host Grails applications on Tomcat server. Because there are some applications writed in PHP already on it, there is no way to bring tomcat on the front (port 80). Only way is to use Apache2 server as a proxy for Tomcat.

Our work we start from installing Apache HTTP Server (v. 2.2):

 
sudo apt-get install apache2
 

Next step is to install Apache Tomcat. To avoid problems after apt-get tomcat installation, try this tutorial.

Now we ready to download mod_jk that will act as bridge between two servers

 
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-jk
 

now configure it:

/etc/apache2/mods-available/jk.conf

JkWorkersFile      /etc/apache2/workers.properties
JkLogFile          "|/usr/sbin/rotatelogs /var/log/apache2/mod_jk.log 86400"
JkLogLevel         info
JkLogStampFormat   "[%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y] "
JkRequestLogFormat "%w %V %T"
JkOptions          +ForwardKeySize +ForwardURICompat -ForwardDirectories

/etc/apache2/workers.properties

worker.list=tomcat6

worker.tomcat6.type=ajp13
worker.tomcat6.host=localhost
worker.tomcat6.port=8009

and create link to jk.conf:

 
ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/jk.conf  /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/jk.conf
 

Now we may configure virtual host in Apache:

 
<virtualHost *:80>
    ServerName grailsappliaction.com
    LogLevel warn
    ServerSignature On
    JkMount /* tomcat6
</virtualHost>
 

and set tomcat host (conf/server.xml):

 
...
 
<host name="grailsappliaction.com" appBase="/path/to/grails/app">
 
...
 

Deploy your grails application in appBase as default (ROOT) application and restart Apache and Tomcat. Your application should be online now.

You may removed this line from tomcat server.xml file, to avoid direct request on 8080 port:

 
...
 
<connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1" connectionTimeout="20000"  redirectPort="8443" />
 
...
 

If there is better way to configure Apache and Tomcat, please let mi know.