12 Set 11 How to install the “Apache Tomcat Native” libtcnative module

The Apache Tomcat Native module, also called “TC-Native library” or “libtcnative”, is a library that implements HTTP, HTTPS and AJP connectors in tomcat using the Apache APR library. This ensure great scalability and performance because permits tomcat to access server native technologies like openssl, system calls like sendfile() or epoll(), advanced I/O, OS level functionality and native Inter Process Communication.

To install libtcnative you must first have a working C compiler environment, a valid “apr” and “openssl” installation with the development libraries, a working apache tomcat 6.0.X and a Java JDK.

On debian it’s as simple as to run:

apt-get install build-essential libapr1-dev libssl-dev

The libtcnative source software can be found in the Tomcat binary bundle, in the bin/tomcat-native.tar.gz archive, but if you want the latest version you can find it here: http://tomcat.apache.org/native-doc/

Untar the tomcat-native archive, then:

cd tomcat-native-1.*/jni/native
./configure –with-apr=`which apr-1-config` –with-java-home=$JAVA_HOME –with-ssl=yes –prefix=$CATALINA_HOME

If you want or need to, you can pass the correct path of APR and OpenSSL libraries to the –with-apr and –with-ssl parameters.
CATALINA_HOME and JAVA_HOME are the path of the Java JDK and Tomcat installations.

After the configure script succeeded, you have to:

make
make install

Now, the libtcnative library should be correctly installed into “$CATALINA_HOME/lib”.
If you want you can now configure tomcat with the new connectors parameters.

The official project page of libtcnative is here: http://tomcat.apache.org/native-doc/
The documentation page of the tomcat 6 APR native functionality is here: http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/apr.html

Hope this help someone to speed installation.
Ciao a tutti, Dino Ciuffetti.