How to make JSTL library work in Tomcat 7 on Ubuntu

Question

I am using Tomcat 7.0.61 on Ubuntu 14.02 LTS and I can see the lib directory existing in the /usr/share/tomcat7 folder.

The typical webapps folder for Tomcat is

/var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/ROOT/

Then I created the separated folder for my web application called myjsp and everything seemed to work really fine because until I tried to install the JSTL taglib library downloaded from the tomcat portal.

On Windows, I put the JSTL jar file in the C:/tomcat7/lib directory which may serve as the shared folder for all applications as far as I know. And it works on Windows because I could import the library in the scripts.

But on Ubuntu right now, nothing is likely to properly work on my system. I have tried moving the JAR file to the /usr/share/tomcat7/lib and in /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/myjsp/WEB-INF/lib

So where should I put the JSTL JAR file in?

Note: I created the WEB-INF folder manually with the only folder in there which is lib folder

Read http://stackoverflow.com/tags/jstl/info: for servlet 3.0, there are 2 jar files to download. And they should be in the WEB-INF/lib folder of your webapp. — JB Nizet, Apr 19 '15 at 06:55
I have to create WEB-INF/lib manually, is that right? So the directory tree is something like this /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/ROOT/myapp/WEB-INF/lib — H.J. Frost, Apr 19 '15 at 07:06

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:24

Don't put anything to the ROOT, because if you undeploy your app the root context will be shown to the user. Use the following path

/var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/myapp

Make sure you have used an environment variable and system property for

CATALINA_BASE=/var/lib/tomcat7

To deploy the application better to create .war file and put it into webapps either manually or better using a tomcat manager app. The tomcat is configured by default to start automatic deployment if you put a file to the webapps. All libraries in the war should be in /WEB-INF/lib.

You can use this answer to download required jars from accredited sources.

How to make JSTL library work in Tomcat 7 on Ubuntu

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