Put Apache Tomcat in its own directory, and your web applications in another
I recently took my first look at Apache Tomcat 6.0. I was inspired by Tomcat: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition , which covers Tomcat 6.0. It mentioned a way to separate the actual Tomcat distribution and binaries from the webapp data, but described it for environments that had it pre-installed as an RPM or DEB package. As I'm writing this, the latest version is 6.0.16. Here's what I had to do to get my webapp code in a separate directory tree from the Tomcat binaries as downloaded straight from tomcat.apache.org . Create a directory, say /home/joshuago/domain.com , where all the webapps for that domain are going to be. Set CATALINA_BASE to the directory above. (Don't set CATALINA_HOME.) Move conf , logs , temp , and webapps directories to /home/joshuago/domain.com/ . Run apache-tomcat-6.0.16/bin/startup.sh script as usual. Start developing at /home/joshuago/domain.com/webapps/ROOT/ . Change the directories as convenient or as suits best practices for your particular envir...