Running Tomcat 7 on EC2

Installing Apache Tomcat 7 on a virtual machine within the Amazon EC2 cloud turned out to be a fairly trivial task. Using the micro instance created in a previous post, I issued the following commands on the Ubuntu command line to install the service:

sudo apt-get install update
sudo apt-get install tomcat7
sudo apt-get install tomcat7-docs
sudo apt-get install tomcat7-examples

In order to bind tomcat to listen on privileged port 80, the following steps were taken:

sudo nano /etc/tomcat7/server.xml
change instances of 8080 to 80, and save file
sudo nano /etc/default/tomcat7
change #AUTHBIND no to #AUTHBIND yes, and save file
sudo service tomcat7 stop
sudo service tomcat7 start

Finally, the Amazon EC2 security group was modified to allow access to port 80.  After these steps, bringing up a browser and accessing http://amazon-dynamic-server-name/docs successfully brought up the Tomcat 7 documentation.

I'm not sure why I was surprised, but I did discover that restarting an EC2 instance resulted in the instance obtaining a new DNS name and IP address.  The next time I work on a server, I need to remember to assign an Elastic IP address to the micro instance (in order to be able to save a PUTTY connection in my profile).