Running Tomcat from USB Flash Drive

Question

Hi all,

I am trying to setup Tomcat to work straight from a USB flash drive. I know that is possible to run apache + mysql + php from USB flash, but what about tomcat?

I found this link which contains some explanations but the links to download the sourcecode or the bin are not working.

http://www.javalobby.org/articles/tomcat2go/

By searching a bit the Internet I managed to find in obscure site the binary which is not working and probably the src needs to be modified to be make it work.

Does anyone know:

1. where to find the src of that article ?

2. If there is any implementation of Tomcat running from a usb flash, and in case any user experience from it.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

That article appears to describe a way to package/install Tomcat so that it appears to be an executable. Is this what you want to do?

Because if all you want to do is install Tomcat on a USB drive, it's really easy.

You need a copy of Tomcat, which you can get here: http://tomcat.apache.org/

And you need a JDK, which you can get here (make sure you just get the J2SDK, without any J2EE stuff): http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp

If you're running on Windows, then install Java to your hard drive and copy the SDK directory onto the USB (this is because the Java installer sets some registry entries to point to the install).

Before you run, you'll need to set JAVA_HOME to point to the USB drive. This can be done with a batch script on the USB.