Lucee on arm64 (Debian 12)

Hi folks,

As we are upgrading to Debian 12 and migrating from x64 to arm64 (intra-cloud) at the same time, I had some challenges getting Lucee 5.4.2.17 up and running.

Challenge 1:
There is currently no installer available for arm64, like we were using it before with x64. @Zackster opened a feature request for it earlier this year.
However, I decided to go the “Debian-way” by not using the packaged Tomcat and JDK going forward by just deploying the latest lucee.jar on Debian’s Tomcat/JDK.
Advantage: Debian’s version of the JDK and Tomcat get updates/security fixes automatically (we are using unattended-upgrades to roll-out security updates whenever available). This way, no files are being put into /opt anymore.

Challenge 2:
Debian 12 comes with Tomcat 10, but Lucee 5 and 6-RC do not work on Tomcat 10 out of the box, and tools like tomcat-jakartaee-migration did not help too much.
Therefore, we need to use Tomcat 9 in Debian 12 (for the time being). For this, we used the Tomcat 9 packages from the older (but still supported) Debian 11. This is not ideal, but does not give any dependency issue and Debian 11 packages are still being updated automatically (thanks to unattended-upgrades).

Challenge 3:
Quite a fair bit of permission issues we had to work around under Debian.

:tada: Got it all working today! :tada:

Let me know if anyone is interested in the steps.
Instead of posting the detailed steps here, happy to contribute to a new guide under https://docs.lucee.org/guides/installing-lucee/ if anyone can let me know how.

P.S.: My instructions should work the same way for Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) as it’s based on Debian.
P.P.S: Also works 1:1 the same for Debian 12 on x86-64, i.e. amd64.

Yes Please do share the steps.

That was 1.5 years ago :slight_smile: I am about to re-do everything as soon as 6.2 is stable (should support Tomcat 10, see System requirements :: Lucee Documentation). The Release Candidate is already out, so probably a matter of days or weeks for it to get released.

This would take away quite some of the extra steps I had to do for Lucee 5.4 back then. If you can wait until I do the 6.2 installation on Tomcat 10, I can provide the steps in here. The earlier installing guide link does not seem to exist anymore.

If you’re interested in the previously described 5.x installation steps on Tomcat 9, please let me know. I usually keep my howto txt’s :slight_smile: