Determine which Tomcat version is running

Determine process id

First we determine the process id(s) of the running Tomcat instance(s).

We can grep the running process list for ‘catalina.home’:

pgrep -f 'catalina.home'

This might yield more than one pid.

Or we can search by port (8080 is the default, adjust if necessary). The following commands will likely require root privileges:

lsof -t -i :8080

Alternatively, for example if lsof is not installed:

fuser 8080/tcp

Or yet another way, using netstat (or its “ss” replacement):

netstat -nlp | grep 8080

ss -nlp | grep 8080

Determine catalina.home

For the process id(s) determined above, we look at process details:

ps -o pid,uid,cmd -p [pidlist] | cat

For each specified pid, this shows the uid (system user) and the full command line of the process.

Typically the command line will contain something like “-Dcatalina.home=[path]” and that path is the catalina.home system property of the Java process.

Alternatively – with Java 7 and later – we can use the JDK command “jcmd” to query the JVM process for its system properties:

sudo -u [uid] jcmd [pid] VM.system_properties \
   | grep '^catalina.home' \
   | cut -f2 -d'='

Determine version

Now we can finally determine which Tomcat version is installed under the catalina.home path:

[catalina.home]/bin/catalina.sh version \
   | grep '^Server number:'

Note: Please replace [catalina.home] with the path you determined above.

The final output should be something like this:

Server number: 7.0.56.0

7 thoughts on “Determine which Tomcat version is running”

  1. I tried the corrected version one-liner – from your gist – but getting an error. I guess we could say that “details are left as an exercise to the reader” … :)

    Reply

  3. It doesn’t help that there is a typo in that example one liner.

    ps aux |grep -v grep | grep -oP ‘(?<=catalina.home=)\S*' | xargs -I {} sh -c 'echo "{}" &/bin/catalina.sh version |grep "Server number" && echo ""'

    I have no doubt you could continue to patch together some more regex and xarg arguments, but its already a bit ugly :)

    Reply

  4. Oliver – good job explaining each step. For the lazy, it might be useful to include a one line that puts each of those steps together?

    Something like:

    ps aux |grep -v grep | grep -oP ‘(?<=catalina.home=)\S*' | xargs -I {} sh -c 'echo "{}" &/bin/catalina.sh version |grep "Server number" && echo ""'

    Reply

    1. Thanks for the feedback, Joe. I wanted to keep the steps separate because of the potential usefulness of the lsof and jcmd steps. But if there is only one Tomcat running then your one-liner seems like a handy thing to have, maybe even as a shell alias or function.

      Reply

      1. I do agree on the useful of the breakdown and the knowledge of each step. The example I posted should echo the catalina.home directory and then the Tomcat version – so it will still work with multiple tomcats running.

      2. Ok, I see. I guess I need to actually try out your command line to see it in action. What about including the port listened to? Can you somehow tweak that into the one-liner ? :)

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