Tomcat 6 on Dreamhost

A short while ago, it was impossible to run Tomcat on Dreamhost PS. It was a bummer, since I needed to deploy my FillPDF servlet (which uses Grails and iText) and I would have preferred to use my favorite hosting service. (A note to people trying every which way to deploy iText on Dreamhost -- don't bother with RJB or PHP/Java bridge on the shared plans -- it just doesn't work).

I was pleased to discover that Dreamhost recently changed this by means of mod_proxy. Now you're able to setup Tomcat on Dreamhost PS, so you can deploy your servlets!

First off, Dreamhost PS's default server install is Debian Etch (4.0), which is only compatible with Tomcat 5.5. I tried working with that stack first, but don't bother -- too many bugs. You'll need to upgrade Etch to Lenny (Debian 5), so you can install Tomcat 6.

Upgrade Etch to Lenny
(note, make sure to use the -y flag when running these operations, so you don't have to type "Y" for every package upgrade.

Next, Install Tomcat 6 (don't skip the JDK 6 part, even though Dreamhost PS comes with Java -- I made that mistake the first time)

Then, setup your mod_proxy to point to port 8080.

That should do it! I didn't say anything new, just gotta have the right sequence of tutorials :) Hit up http://{yoursite}/manager/html and deploy your app.