The number of people in the entire world for whom this post is useful is probably in the single digits. Nonetheless, I did this and you may want to as well, so here is how I did it. It helps to su to root to save having to type sudo before every command.

Firstly, install Tomcat

apt-get update
apt-get install tomcat8 tomcat8-common tomcat8-admin

Next we need to give Tomcat an admin user. Edit the file /etc/tomcat8/tomcat-users.xml and add the following…

<role rolename="admin-gui"/>
<user username="admin" password="password" roles="admin-gui,manager-gui"/>

Next, and I guess this is optional depending on whether or not you want to access the database from a different host on the local network or not, but you now need to edit /etc/tomcat8/Catalina/localhost/manager.xml and add the element…

<Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.RemoteAddrValve" allow="^.*$" />

…somewhere within the existing <Context> tag.

Now add the same Valve item to the following files

• /etc/tomcat8/Catalina/localhost/host-manager.xml
• /usr/share/tomcat8-admin/manager/META-INF/context.xml
• /usr/share/tomcat8-admin/host-manager/META-INF/context.xml

Restart Tomcat and you should be able to get into the manager webapp

/etc/init.d/tomcat8 restart

Visit http://[ip_address]:8080/manager to check it works. If not, fix it before continuing.

Next download the latest version of Sesame (4.1.2 is the final release). Look in the archive for the two war files, and deploy them using Tomcat’s web interface.

Before you can use it, you need to make a log directory that the Tomcat user can use.

mkdir -p /var/lib/tomcat8/.aduna
chown -R tomcat8:tomcat8 /var/lib/tomcat8
chmod -R o+rx /var/log/tomcat8

And restart Tomcat…

/etc/init.d/tomcat8 restart

Finally, visit http://[ip_address]:8080/openrdf-sesame to initialise the database, before visiting http://[ip_address]:8080/openrdf-workbench to create some data. Enjoy.