Installing Tomcat 7 - no JAVA_HOME while JDK is installed

Question

I'm trying to get Tomcat7 running on a Raspberry Pi B+. I get an error message saying that JAVA_HOME is not set. I guess that if I set it in Bash, it won't load on startup, or am I wrong there?

sudo apt-get install tomcat7
[FAIL] no JDK found - please set JAVA_HOME ... failed!
invoke-rc.d: initscript tomcat7, action "start" failed.

JDK is installed:

ls -al /usr/lib/jvm/
total 32
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 mrt 13 14:23 .
drwxr-xr-x 72 root root 12288 mrt 13 14:19 ..
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 mrt 13 14:23 jdk-7-oracle-armhf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1917 sep 25 2013 .jdk-7-oracle-armhf.jinfo
drwxr-xr-x 9 root root 4096 feb 16 13:31 jdk-8-oracle-arm-vfp-hflt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2155 mrt 22 2014 .jdk-8-oracle-arm-vfp-hflt.jinfo

I;ve created the file /etc/profile.d/jdk_home

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/jdk-8-oracle-arm-vfp-hflt/

After a restart this doesn't change anything.

How can I get this working?

• goldilocks: If you're using the default graphical login (lightdm), /etc/profile and other bash login shell scripts never get sourced, because you never actually start a login shell (different DM's have different policies about this...). Try /etc/environment instead (there's probably nothing in it currently).
• SPRBRN: I use the commandline only right now. After a restart, $JAVA_HOME returned the right result, but Tomcat doesn't see it. Still the same error. Tomcat is a system service, so it should load at startup, independent of logins.
• Marcel Korpel: @goldilocks I tried to set JAVA_HOME in /etc/environment, but the system still starts with an error that the variable is not set (during startup).

Answer 1

Look into /etc/init.d/tomcat7 startup file, you'll see it requires a default-java link against your JDK directory.

$ cd /usr/lib/jvm $ sudo ln -s jdk-8-oracle-arm-vfp-hflt default-java

Done - now you can start your tomcat7 instance.

• Marcel Korpel: I still get the no JDK found - please set JAVA_HOME message, even with the link. I added export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/jdk-8-oracle-arm-vfp-hflt to .bashrc in /home/pi, /root and in /etc/environment. I get the message on startup as well as when trying to start Tomcat using sudo service tomcat7 start.