Tag: version

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

Get java version string via shell commands

Determine the pure java version string from any Unix/Linux shell (including Cygwin):

java -version 2>&1 | head -n 1 | cut -d'"' -f2

This requires only the very commonly available and lightweight “head” and “cut” commands.

I originally found the one-liner on stackoverflow. Thanks to the friendly folks who shared it.

To get only the major version part (e.g. 8 for Java 1.8.x, 11 for 11.x), use this:

java -version 2>&1 \
  | head -1 \
  | cut -d'"' -f2 \
  | sed 's/^1\.//' \
  | cut -d'.' -f1

Note: The sed step is required for versions up to Java 8 that start with the “1.” prefix.

Example: Ensure Java 11 or higher:

#!/bin/bash

version=$(java -version 2>&1 \
  | head -1 \
  | cut -d'"' -f2 \
  | sed 's/^1\.//' \
  | cut -d'.' -f1 
)

if [ $version -lt "11" ]; then
  echo "Java 11 or higher is required."
  exit 1
fi