Make tomcat wait until oracle database is available

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Recently I’ve been installing the OATOA (Oracle APEX on Tomcat with ORDS behind Apache) stack a number of times on both Oracle Linux 7 and CentOS7.

In the past this was no problem, Tomcat came up and a request to http://myserver:8080/ords/ gave me the expected APEX login screen.

However since Oracle Linux 7 and CentOS7, it seemed that Tomcat started before it could find the Oracle database. A simple restart of the tomcat service would do the trick. On my virtual machine (recently switched from VirtualBox to parallels btw) meant for doing presentations no problem at all.

systemctl restart tomcat

Now I’m playing around with “droplets” at DigitalOcean, just another name for virtual servers in my opinion, but they have great features at a reasonable price. Take a look: https://m.do.co/c/187c0416a2b3.

But my droplets showed the same behaviour as my parallels virtual machine. I first had to restart tomcat to get a working system.

You all should know that I’m not a linux guru (really I’m not), so broke my brains about this for a looooong time.

Yesterday I finally managed to get this working. The idea is to make the tomcat start-script wait until it can see “something” on port 1521 (the db listener) and only then continue to start.

Open the file /usr/libexec/tomcat/server

nano /usr/libexec/tomcat/server

now add some lines of code _before_ the line that starts with MAIN_CLASS like this:

#!/bin/bash

. /usr/libexec/tomcat/preamble

# .=.=.=.=.= START Make tomcat wait on oracle .=.=.=.=.=
i=1
while netstat -lnt | awk ‘$4 ~ /:1521$/ {exit 1}’0
do
  sleep 10
  let i+=1
  if [ “$i” -gt “5” ]
  then
    break #Abandon the loop.
  fi
done
# give Oracle some slack to also start the database
sleep 10
# .=.=.=.=.= END Make tomcat wait on oracle .=.=.=.=.=

MAIN_CLASS=org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap

add the obvious lines to your script.

What is happening?
The line “netstat -lnt | awk …” tries to find the string “:1521” in the result of a “netstat -lnt” command. This would indicate that something is listening on that port. In our case it will be the Oracle Listener.
If it does not find an open port 1521, it will sleep for 10 seconds, increment a counter (“i”) by 1 and do the loop again. The loop will loop a maximum of five times to prevent an endless loop.
After the loop completes we give the Oracle database another 10 seconds to get started.

That should do the trick. It does for me (I use the same code at digitalocean as well as my parallels virtual linux server.

I’m sure linux must have some system in place that could do the trick as well (make one service dependable on the other) but I haven’t found an easy one to use. If someone could help me out here, feel free to leave a comment.

Regards,
Richard

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