Installing Tomcat 8 on OS X 10.10 Yosemite

https://wolfpaulus.com/jounal/mac/tomcat8/

The Servlet 4.0 specification is out and Tomcat 9.0.x will support it. However, at this point Tomcat 8.0.x is the best Tomcat version and it is supporting the 3.1 Servlet Spec.

 

Since OS X 10.7 Java is not (pre-)installed anymore, let’s fix that first.

Prerequisite: Java

As I’m writing this, Java 8u45 is the latest version, available for download here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk8-downloads-2133151.html

The JDK installer package come in an dmg and installs easily on the Mac; and after opening the Terminal app again,

java -version

now shows something like this:

java version "1.8.0_45"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_45-b14)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.45-b02, mixed mode)

Whatever you do, when opening Terminal and running java -version, you should see something like this, with a version of at least 1.7.x I.e. Tomcat 8.x requires Java 7 or later.

sudo is a program for Unix-like operating systems, allowing you to run programs with the security privileges of another user (normally the superuser, or root).Since we are creating directories, outside of your home folder, administrator right are required. I.e., when executing sudo you will be asked to enter your password; and your Mac User account needs to be an ‘Admin’ account.

JAVA_HOME is an important environment variable, not just for Tomcat, and it’s important to get it right. Here is a trick that allows me to keep the environment variable current, even after a Java Update was installed. In ~/.bash_profile, I set the variable like so:

export JAVA_HOME=$(/usr/libexec/java_home)

Installing Tomcat

Here are the easy to follow steps to get it up and running on your Mac

1. Download a binary distribution of the core module: apache-tomcat-8.0.22.tar.gz from here. I picked the tar.gz in Binary Distributions / Core section.
2. Opening/unarchiving the archive will create a folder structure in your Downloads folder: (btw, this free Unarchiver app is perfect for all kinds of compressed files and superior to the built-in Archive Utility.app)
   ~/Downloads/apache-tomcat-8.0.22
3. Open to Terminal app to move the unarchived distribution to /usr/local
   sudo mkdir -p /usr/local
sudo mv ~/Downloads/apache-tomcat-8.0.22 /usr/local
4. To make it easy to replace this release with future releases, we are going to create a symbolic link that we are going to use when referring to Tomcat (after removing the old link, you might have from installing a previous version):
   sudo rm -f /Library/Tomcat
sudo ln -s /usr/local/apache-tomcat-8.0.22 /Library/Tomcat

5. Change ownership of the /Library/Tomcat folder hierarchy:
   sudo chown -R <your_username> /Library/Tomcat
6. Make all scripts executable:
   sudo chmod +x /Library/Tomcat/bin/*.sh

Tomcat 8.x

 

Instead of using the start and stop scripts, like so:

47 wolf:~$ /Library/Tomcat/bin/startup.sh
Using CATALINA_BASE: /Library/Tomcat
Using CATALINA_HOME: /Library/Tomcat
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /Library/Tomcat/temp
Using JRE_HOME: /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_45.jdk/Contents/Home
Using CLASSPATH: /Library/Tomcat/bin/bootstrap.jar:/Library/Tomcat/bin/tomcat-juli.jar
Tomcat started.
48 wolf:~$ /Library/Tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh
Using CATALINA_BASE: /Library/Tomcat
Using CATALINA_HOME: /Library/Tomcat
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /Library/Tomcat/temp
Using JRE_HOME: /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_45.jdk/Contents/Home
Using CLASSPATH: /Library/Tomcat/bin/bootstrap.jar:/Library/Tomcat/bin/tomcat-juli.jar
49 wolf:~$

you may also want to check out Activata’s Tomcat Controller, a tiny freeware app, providing a UI to quickly start/stop Tomcat. It may not say so, but Tomcat Controller works on OS X 10.10 just fine.

Finally, after your started Tomcat, open your Mac’s Web browser and take a look at the default page: http://localhost:8080

39 Comments