Installing Apache Tomcat 6 on Snow Leopard ( OSX 10.6 )

It’s been a long time since I worked on a JSP project and I’m now tasked with the setup of a workspace in Eclipse, this time I’m solely using OS X to develop on. Here are the steps I took to setup my local workspace.

Download the Apache Tomcat

Found under Binary Distribution as a tar.gz under ‘Core’

Move and untar

$ cd /usr/local
$ mv ~/Downloads/apache-tomcat-6.0.24.tar .
$ tar -xzvf apache-tomcat-6.0.24.tar
$ mv apache-tomcat-6.0.24 tomcat6

Starting and Stopping Tomcat

$ mkdir bin
$ cd bin

Create a file under called start_tomcat ( e.g. ~/bin/start_tomcat ) with the following contents:

#!/bin/sh
export CATALINA_HOME=/usr/local/tomcat6
export JAVA_HOME=/usr
$CATALINA_HOME/bin/startup.sh

..and another for stopping tomcat ( e.g. stop_tomcat )

#!/bin/sh
export CATALINA_HOME=/usr/local/tomcat6
export JAVA_HOME=/usr
$CATALINA_HOME/bin/shutdown.sh

Make the files executable:

$ chmod ug+x start_tomcat stop_tomcat

Now you can start and stop tomcat with commands these commands:

~/bin/start_tomcat
~/bin/stop_tomcat

Apple has some good docs on tomcat, even if they’re out of date.