Running Geronimo as a non-root user

Geronimo Administration Console

Administration

Tools and commands

It is very likely that you will not want to have the Geronimo server process under the super user root. The following are a series of simple steps for changing the ownership and permissions for the required files in order to run Geronimo with a different user.

The following tasks should be performed while logged as root or a user with enough access rights.

1. create a new user (i.e. gmo) and add it to a specific user group. You could use the predefined www user group for instance.
2. edit the .bashrc for the user you just created and add the PATH and JAVA_HOME variables:
   PATH=$PATH:<java_home>/bin
export PATH
JAVA_HOME=<java_home>
export JAVA_HOME
3. change the user group to all the subdirs in <geronimo_home>
   chown -R root:www <geronimo_home>
4. create a deploy directory within the <geronimo_home> directory structure.
5. change the access permissions to the following directories
   chmod -R 774 <geronimo_home>/bin
chmod -R 774 <geronimo_home>/deploy
chmod -R 774 <geronimo_home>/repository
chmod -R 774 <geronimo_home>/var
6. login as the new user (i.e. gmo)
7. cd <geronimo_home>/bin
8. ./geronimo.sh run

You are now able to run and deploy applications with a user other than root.