Sitecore 8 + Solr (part 1/3): Install Tomcat

This is part one of a three-part series intended to guide you step-by-step through the process of making Sitecore 8 and Solr work together. There are some good resources on the Internet, but none of them are a soup-to-nuts walkthrough, and unfortunately there are many pitfalls along the way especially if you are unfamiliar with tools like Apache Tomcat or Solr -- even if you are, the current state of Sitecore's documentation for working with Solr isn't complete for Sitecore 8. I'm sure that will change soon! :)

So, in this first post our goal is to get Apache Tomcat running on a Windows machine installed as a Windows service. Onwards!

1. Since Solr and Tomcat both require the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to run, we'll need to start with installing the correct JRE for our machine. This guide uses jre-8u31-windows-x64.exe.
2. Download and install the Windows Service Installer for Tomcat. This guide uses version 8.0.18 of Tomcat, but you can safely use a more recent version. There are a few decisions to make with the installation wizard. You may choose to install the Host Manager component; this will expose a host manager gui to Tomcat’s built-in administration page.
   
   
   
   
   
3. The default port used by Tomcat is 8080 (used to be 8983) but you may elect to use some other port. Don’t choose port 80 unless you are prepared to tinker with IIS to re-route requests meant for Tomcat to Tomcat; it’s not really worth the effort. Nevertheless, here is a link to a helpful resource: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Integrating+JIRA+with+IIS.
   
   
   
   
   If you do not supply an optional user name and password, then you will need to manually edit the conf/tomcat-users.xml file (found under the Tomcat install path) in order to manage Tomcat from the built-in administrative web site. If you do find yourself editing the tomcat-users.xml file, don’t forget to stop-restart Tomcat for those changes to take effect. You can do this with the Monitor Tomcat tool:
   
   
   
   
   
4. Test the Tomcat installation by pointing your browser to http://localhost:8080 assuming that you used port 8080 as your HTTP Connector Port.
   
   
   
   
   
5. By default, the Tomcat Windows service startup type is “Manual.” This means that after rebooting your machine you will need to remember to manually restart the Tomcat service. Change the Tomcat Windows Service startup to “Automatic.”
   
   
   
   
   
6. As a final, optional step, you might elect to add an alias to Tomcat so that the website can be accessed using something other than localhost. For example, you could add the tag <Alias>tomcat</Alias> to the conf/server.xml file. Don't forget—if you use an alias then make sure you either update your DNS server to use that alias or edit your hosts file in Windows. :)
   
   
   
   
   

At this point you should have a working Tomcat installation that will be available even after a reboot of your machine. In the next post of this series we will tackle installing Solr on top of Tomcat.