Upgrading Tomcat independently of Cascade CMS

Before you start

  • Verify that you are attempting to upgrade to the same minor version of the Tomcat release that we support. As an example, if the Cascade CMS installer comes bundled with Tomcat 9.0.33, you will have the ability to upgrade to Tomcat 9.0.45 but not to Tomcat 9.5 (if it becomes available) or Tomcat 10.x.
  • To find out the current version of Tomcat that Cascade CMS is using in your environment, go to Administration > Logs and System Information > Server Information.
  • If you are unsure whether or not a particular version of Tomcat is supported, please reach out to support [at] hannonhill.com for more information.

Steps to upgrade Tomcat

Note: The steps below are specific to Linux/*nix installations, but similar steps may be used for other operating systems as well.
  1. Stop Cascade CMS.
  2. Make a copy of your existing tomcat directory and keep it somewhere safe (and outside of the Cascade CMS installation directory). You'll need this to copy and/or reference certain files for the new Tomcat installation. It can also be used to quickly restore the application if the new version of Tomcat fails.
  3. Delete the existing tomcat folder from within the Cascade CMS installation.
  4. Download the newer version of Tomcat (core [zip]) from https://tomcat.apache.org and place it where the existing tomcat folder was located in the Cascade CMS installation directory.
  5. Extract the contents of the zip file. This will produce a folder apache-tomcat-9.0.45, for example.
  6. Rename the extracted folder from apache-tomcat-9.0.45 to tomcat.
  7. Using the backup of your old tomcat directory, copy the following files from the conf folder into the new tomcat/conf folder:
    • context.xml
    • server.xml
    • ehcache.properties
    • web.xml
  8. Add execute permissions to the new Tomcat scripts (in tomcat/bin). Example: 
    $ cd /usr/local/cascade/tomcat/bin
    $ find . -name "*.sh" -exec chmod u+x {} \;
  9. Using the backup of your old tomcat directory, copy the tomcat/webapps/ROOT folder into the new tomcat/webapps directory.
  10. Start Cascade CMS.