I have no experience with Tomcat but being a web developer and hosting provider for my customers, we use Virtualmin to manage all our web servers… we focus on web development not server administration, so Virtualmin will allow the whole shebang of virtual server, email accounts, FTP, SSH, etc all to be setup quickly using the admin interface. I dont think I would ever consider using the command line to setup all this for web hosting, would take too long. Unless you have some scripts to automate it.

@TheRedAaron:

I'be bought 2 domains and want both to host web apps on one Linode server. I can set up different web apps in Tomcat no problem but where do I tell what to send each web request to the right app on Tomcat?

Here's how I use Apache and Tomcat together on Ubuntu:

1) In /etc/apache2/conf.d I have two .conf files, one for http traffic and one for https. In the http one for example, I have sections for each site I host in Tomcat or on whatever backend server I wanted like Ruby (that'll never happen).

2) In each of those ````
# main site, I've had this set though I think Tomcat
# works fine with it off, the default, depends on the needs
# of the backend server
ProxyPreserveHost On

 # main site, trailing slash is important in general
 ProxyPass        / http://127.0.0.1:8080/MyMainSite/
 ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:8080/MyMainSite/
 # main site, one more thing I did but might not be
 # needed for the main site, can't remember why now
 ProxyPass        /MyMainSite http://127.0.0.1:8080/MyMainSite/
 ProxyPassReverse /MyMainSite http://127.0.0.1:8080/MyMainSite/

 # remaining sites just these two are needed
 # site FooTrain, trailing slash is important in general
 ProxyPass        / http://127.0.0.1:8080/FooTrain/
 ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:8080/FooTrain/

 # site GlobalFoo, trailing slash is important in general
 ProxyPass        / http://127.0.0.1:8080/GlobalFoo/
 ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:8080/GlobalFoo/

…etc.

One nice thing about this configuration is that one SSL certificate protects all the content for my main site whether the content comes from Tomcat or Apache or any other backend server that I choose to configure with a ProxyPass ProxyPassReverse combination.

Good luck!

PS I run Tomcat in its own account using a script:

checktomcatrunning.sh

!/bin/sh

wget --spider 127.0.0.1:8080
STATUS=$?
if [ "$STATUS" = "0" ]; then
echo running
else
echo stopped, restarting Tomcat
# run the standard tomcat startup.sh
/home/tomcataccountname/bin/runtomcat.sh
fi

And I run that checktomcatrunning.sh script from the account's cron:

• * * * * /home/tomcataccountname/bin/checktomcatrunning.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

````

Hope this helps.