Tomcat can be run as a daemon using the jsvc tool from the commons-daemon project. Source tarballs for jsvc are included with the Tomcat binaries, and need to be compiled. Building jsvc requires a C ANSI compiler (such as GCC), GNU Autoconf, and a JDK.

Before running the script, the JAVA_HOME environment variable should be set to the base path of the JDK. Alternately, when calling the ./configure script, the path of the JDK may be specified using the--with-java parameter, such as ./configure --with-java=/usr/java.

Using the following commands should result in a compiled jsvc binary, located in the $CATALINA_HOME/bin folder. This assumes that GNU TAR is used, and that CATALINA_HOME is an environment variable pointing to the base path of the Tomcat installation.

Please note that you should use the GNU make (gmake) instead of the native BSD make on FreeBSD systems.

    cd $CATALINA_HOME/bin
    tar xvfz commons-daemon-native.tar.gz
    cd commons-daemon-1.0.x-native-src/unix
    ./configure
    make
    cp jsvc ../..
    cd ../..

 CATALINA_BASE=$CATALINA_HOME
    cd $CATALINA_HOME
    ./bin/jsvc \
        -classpath $CATALINA_HOME/bin/bootstrap.jar:$CATALINA_HOME/bin/tomcat-juli.jar \
        -outfile $CATALINA_BASE/logs/catalina.out \
        -errfile $CATALINA_BASE/logs/catalina.err \
        -Dcatalina.home=$CATALINA_HOME \
        -Dcatalina.base=$CATALINA_BASE \
        -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager \
        -Djava.util.logging.config.file=$CATALINA_BASE/conf/logging.properties \
        org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap

jsvc has other useful parameters, such as -user which causes it to switch to another user after the daemon initialization is complete. This allows, for example, running Tomcat as a non privileged user while still being able to use privileged ports. Note that if you use this option and start Tomcat as root, you'll need to disable the org.apache.catalina.security.SecurityListener check that prevents Tomcat starting when running as root.

jsvc --help will return the full jsvc usage information. In particular, the -debug option is useful to debug issues running jsvc.

The file $CATALINA_HOME/bin/daemon.sh can be used as a template for starting Tomcat automatically at boot time from/etc/init.d with jsvc.

Note that the Commons-Daemon JAR file must be on your runtime classpath to run Tomcat in this manner. The Commons-Daemon JAR file is in the Class-Path entry of the bootstrap.jar manifest, but if you get a ClassNotFoundException or a NoClassDefFoundError for a Commons-Daemon class, add the Commons-Daemon JAR to the -cp argument when launching jsvc.