Configure Tomcat to use a different temp directory for file uploads

Question

My Tomcat instance is sitting on a drive with little remaining space. The application I'm running does move file uploads off the server and into a NAS. During the upload, however, Tomcat keeps this file locally, presumably in the /temp directory.

My server has a second data drive with plenty of space where I'd like to relocate this temp directory to. How can I configure Tomcat so that it uses a temp directory on this other drive, ie. how can I relocate this directory?

Edit: I'm running Windows server 2k3. I tried setting the CATALINA_TMPDIR env var, but Tomcat appeared to ignore it.

Solution: I'm using the "Monitor Tomcat" application which passes

-Djava.io.tmpdir=C:\some\default\directory

to the JVM. This was overriding the environmental variable I was setting. You can find it under Java > Java Options

Changing this has fixed my problem.

Answer 1

The java.io.tmpdir in Tomcat is set to $CATALINA_BASE/temp. You can change it by setting the $CATALINA_TMPDIR environment variable before running startup.sh for Tomcat.

From catalina.sh:

#   CATALINA_TMPDIR (Optional) Directory path location of temporary directory
#                   the JVM should use (java.io.tmpdir).  Defaults to
#                   $CATALINA_BASE/temp.

Answer 2

If you're on UNIX/Linux you can just symlink your temp directory on a first drive to the corresponding directory on a second drive. Maybe not a most elegant solution but it worked for me sometime.