What is the most appropriate place to place tomcat in a RHEL/Centos Environment

Question

Developing a virtual machine that will be managed by IT Admins - where is the most appropriate or commonly accepted place to install the tomcat directory on a CentOS system?

Answer 1

Default directory maybe :

/usr/local

Answer 2

I saw many on /opt, same for jdk, /opt/java...

Answer 3

The location that the package maintainer specifies. Tomcat5 & tomcat6 packages are available from the JPackage yum repository. Using the package maintenance mechanisms of your operating system(yum in the case of CentOS) relieves a lot of cruftiness and administrative overhead in my experience.

Answer 4

Where the package puts it.

There is a tomcat5 rpm available from the "updates" repo in CentOS5.

Its actually just a redistributed copy of the jpackage one.

[jim@ssh ~]$ yum info tomcat5
Loaded plugins: fastestmirror
addons                                                                                                                                                                                                  |  951 B     00:00
base                                                                                                                                                                                                    | 2.1 kB     00:00
epel                                                                                                                                                                                                    | 3.4 kB     00:00
epel/primary_db                                                                                                                                                                                         | 3.3 MB     00:00
extras                                                                                                                                                                                                  | 2.1 kB     00:00
updates                                                                                                                                                                                                 | 1.9 kB     00:00
updates/primary_db                                                                                                                                                                                      | 560 kB     00:00
Available Packages
Name       : tomcat5
Arch       : x86_64
Version    : 5.5.23
Release    : 0jpp.9.el5_5
Size       : 361 k
Repo       : updates
Summary    : Apache Servlet/JSP Engine, RI for Servlet 2.4/JSP 2.0 API
URL        : http://tomcat.apache.org/
License    : Apache Software License
Description: Tomcat is the servlet container that is used in the official Reference
           : Implementation for the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies.
           : The Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages specifications are developed by
           : Sun under the Java Community Process.
           :
           : Tomcat is developed in an open and participatory environment and
           : released under the Apache Software License. Tomcat is intended to be
           : a collaboration of the best-of-breed developers from around the world.
           : We invite you to participate in this open development project. To
           : learn more about getting involved, click here.