How is the Tomcat temp directory location defined?

Question

I am running Tomcat bundled with Liferay5.2.3 and use Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo) as my IDE. I set up my Tomcat server in Eclipse as per this blog entry: http://www.jroller.com/holy/entry/developing_portlets_for_liferay_in. If I start Tomcat via the Eclipse server config, Liferay/Tomcat uses my C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Temp\ directory. However, if I start Tomcat directly using the startup.bat script, Liferay/Tomcat uses the Tomcat temp directory. I can't figure out if Eclipse, Liferay or Tomcat is deciding which temp directory to use or how to change it. I would prefer to use the Tomcat temp directory.

I have this issue with both the Lifera/Tomcat bundles 5.5 and 6.0 (liferay-portal-tomcat-6.0-5.2.3.zip and liferay-portal-tomcat-5.5-5.2.3.zip).

Anybody have any clues?

Answer 1

Although I still don't know where/how Tomcat determines where the default temp directory should be, nor do I know why Eclipse sets it to something different, I have found out that you can set the temp directory via a VM argument when starting Tomcat in Eclipse:

-Djava.io.tmpdir="C:\Program Files\liferay-portal-5.2.3-tomcat-6.0\tomcat-6.0.18\temp"

Answer 2

When you start Tomcat with catalina.sh (or catalina.bat), the temp directory is set with the CATALINA_TPMDIR variable:

if [ -z "$CATALINA_TMPDIR" ] ; then
# Define the java.io.tmpdir to use for Catalina
    CATALINA_TMPDIR="$CATALINA_BASE"/temp
fi