Bessere Alternative

I like the Debian system of having a file in ?/etc/default? with a simple ENABLED setting. With this you can easily enable/disable a service. If you for some reason want do disable Tomcat/Solr you just set ?ENABLED=0? and the service will not autostart.

echo "ENABLED=1" > /etc/default/tomcat

Then the script itself.

vim /etc/init.d/tomcat

Put the following in the tomcat file.

# Tomcat auto-start
#
# description: Auto-starts tomcat
# processname: tomcat
# pidfile: /var/run/tomcat.pid
ENABLED=0

if [ -f /etc/default/tomcat ]; then
  . /etc/default/tomcat
fi

if [ "$ENABLED" = "0" ]; then
  exit 0
fi

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre
export JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Dsolr.solr.home=/opt/solr"
export CATALINA_OPTS="-Xms64m -Xmx64m"

case $1 in
start)
  sh /opt/tomcat/bin/startup.sh
  ;;
stop)
  sh /opt/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh
  ;;
restart)
  sh /opt/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh
  sh /opt/tomcat/bin/startup.sh
  ;;
esac
exit 0

The CATALINA_OPTS parameter controls how much RAM Tomcat is. The default was to high for my VPS so I set it down to 64 MB. I have not investigated what the optimum is here but it seems works for my small site at least.

-Xms[size] set initial Java heap size
-Xmx[size] set maximum Java heap size

Make the script executable and add the appropriate symbolic links to cause the script to be executed when the system goes down, or comes up.

chmod 755 /etc/init.d/tomcat
update-rc.d tomcat defaults

Now we can start Apache Tomcat and Solr with this command. (On reboots it will automatically start.)

invoke-rc.d tomcat start