Install and Configure Tomcat6 on Ubuntu Linux

Apache Tomcat is an open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies.

The Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages specifications are developed under the Java Community Process.

Part 1
First, install tomcat6:

sudo apt-get install tomcat6 tomcat6-docs tomcat6-examples tomcat6-admin

Then configure a user to be manager and admin by adding the following lines

  <role rolename="admin"/>
  <role rolename="manager"/>
  <user username="YOURUSERNAME" password="YOURPASSWORD" roles="admin,manager"/>

in your /var/lib/tomcat6/conf/tomcat-users.xml. Make sure you put it between the <tomcat-users> and </tomcat-users> tags and don't forget to replace YOURUSERNAME with your actual username.
Now go to a browser and hit:

http://localhost:8080/

and you should see the welcome page.

Part 2
To restart tomcat you just need to say:

sudo /etc/init.d/tomcat6 restart

or if you want to start/stop/get status you just replace restart with start/stop/status.
To make this easier go to a terminal and type:

gedit tomcat

then add the following lines of text:

#!/bin/bash

/etc/init.d/tomcat6 $1

then save and close and type:

chmod u+x tomcat
sudo mv tomcat /usr/local/bin

so if you want to stop tomcat you can now say:

sudo tomcat stop

Let's add auto-completion to our new command now. Open a terminal and type:

gedit tomcat

then copy paste the following

_tomcat() 
{
    local cur prev opts
    COMPREPLY=()
    cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}"
    prev="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD-1]}"
    opts="start stop restart status"

    if [[ ${cur} == * ]] ; then
        COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "${opts}" -- ${cur}) )
        return 0
    fi
}
complete -F _tomcat tomcat

save and close gedit. Now type:

sudo mv tomcat /etc/bash_completion.d

You need to restart for this to take effect, but if you want to test it right away type:

. /etc/bash_completion.d/tomcat

Then as an example, type:

sudo tomcat re

and hit tab a couple of times. It should complete the word restart for you since it's the only valid option that begins with "re".