Tomcat

Introduction

Installing Orbeon Forms on Tomcat is only one of the possibilities. You can also install Orbeon Forms on other Servlet containers. You can also use Docker containers. See also:

Supported Tomcat versions

The following versions of Tomcat are supported:

Orbeon Forms Version
Tomcat Versions
Comment

2024.1

9, 10

2023.1

8.5, 9, 10

2019.2, 2020.1, 2021.1, 2022.1

8.5, 9

2019.1

8.5, 9

2018.2

8.0, 8.5, 9

Tomcat 8.0 not recommended, see below

2018.1

8.0, 8.5, 9

Tomcat 8.0 not recommended, see below

2017.2

7, 8.0, 8.5, 9

Tomcat 8.0 not recommended, see below

2017.1

6, 7, 8.0, 8.5

Tomcat 6 and 8.0 not recommended, see below

Notes about older versions of Tomcat:

  • The Apache Tomcat team has announced that support for Apache Tomcat 6.0.x ended on December 31, 2016.

    • Tomcat 6 isn't supported by Orbeon Forms starting with version 2017.2.

  • The Apache Tomcat team has announced that support for Apache Tomcat 8.0.x ended on June 30, 2019.

    • Tomcat 8.0 isn't supported by Orbeon Forms starting with version 2019.1, but Tomcat 8.5 is supported.

  • TIFF support is not available when using Tomcat 6 (see #2717).

Setup

We assume below that TOMCAT_HOME represents the location of your Tomcat installation.

If using Orbeon Forms PE, make sure the license.xml file is in place.

Quick setup

  1. Create a new TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/orbeon directory.

  2. Unzip orbeon.war in the orbeon directory you just created. So now you should have a directory TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/orbeon/WEB-INF.

  3. You can now start Tomcat, and access http://localhost:8080/orbeon/ to test your installation (replacing localhost and 8080 with the host name and port number of your Tomcat installation if different from the default).

Optional steps

Custom context within server.xml

Edit TOMCAT_HOME/conf/server.xml, and inside the <Host> create a <Context> as follows, changing the value of the docBase attribute as appropriate on your system. Make sure the <Context> element is within the <Host> element. Tomcat will not report an error if your context is misplaced in the file, and that will cause it to be ignored and, in particular, datasources might not be taken into account.

<Context
    path="/orbeon"
    docBase="TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/orbeon"
    reloadable="false"
    override="true"
    allowLinking="true"/>

Compression

Unless you have another front-end performing stream compression, it is important to tell Tomcat to enable gzip compression on its connectors. This makes the amount of data transferred for JavaScript and CSS assets, in particular, significantly smaller. You can enable this on the Tomcat <Connector> elements in server.xml with the compression="on" attribute. For example:

<Connector 
    port="8080" 
    protocol="HTTP/1.1"
    connectionTimeout="20000"
    URIEncoding="UTF-8"
    compression="on"
/>

You can check that compression is working in your browser's Dev Tools' Network tab, where the two sizes indicate the compressed size and the uncompressed size:

Gzip compression sizes

Response headers will also include a Content-Encoding: gzip response header on pages and most text assets.

Datasource setup

If you have a JDBC datasource, add it inside the <Context>, as in the following example:

<Context
    path="/orbeon"
    docBase="/path/to/orbeon-war"
    reloadable="false"
    override="true"
    allowLinking="true">
    <Resource 
        name="jdbc/mysql"
        driverClassName="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
        
        auth="Container" 
        type="javax.sql.DataSource"
        
        initialSize="3" 
        maxActive="10" 
        maxIdle="10" 
        maxWait="30000"
        
        poolPreparedStatements="true"
        
        testOnBorrow="true"
        validationQuery="select 1"
        
        username="orbeon"
        password="password"
        url="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/orbeon?useUnicode=true&amp;characterEncoding=UTF8"/>
</Context>

URIEncoding

We recommend you add the URIEncoding="UTF-8" attribute on the <Connector> element, in your server.xml, as recommended in the Tomcat FAQ. This will ensure that all characters get properly decoded on the URL, which is especially important if you're using non-ASCII characters in the app or form name in Form Builder.

Form Runner authentication

To setup Form Runner authentication:

  1. Open TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/orbeon/WEB-INF/web.xml and uncomment the security-constraint, login-config and security-role declarations at the end of the file.

  2. Open TOMCAT_HOME/conf/server.xml and make sure there is a <Realm> enabled. For example, by default with Tomcat 7:

    <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.LockOutRealm">
    <Realm
        className="org.apache.catalina.realm.UserDatabaseRealm"
        resourceName="UserDatabase"/>
</Realm>

  3. Edit TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml and replace the content of the file with:

    <tomcat-users>
    <user
        username="orbeon-user"
        password="Secret, change me!"
        roles="orbeon-user"/>
    <user
        username="orbeon-admin"
        password="Secret, change me!"
        roles="orbeon-user,orbeon-admin"/>
</tomcat-users>

  4. Enumerate the roles in the following property:

    <property
    as="xs:string"
    name="oxf.fr.authentication.container.roles"
    value="orbeon-user orbeon-admin"/>

BASIC or DIGEST authentication

For BASIC or DIGEST authentication, add the following <Valve> element within the <Context> element corresponding to the Orbeon Forms web application in Tomcat's configuration. Remove this <Valve> element if switching to FORM authentication, as leaving it will enforce BASIC or DIGEST authentication regardless of the configuration in web.xml.

<Valve
    className="org.apache.catalina.authenticator.BasicAuthenticator"
    changeSessionIdOnAuthentication="false"/>
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