Installing Tomcat on a MacBook

Today I installed Tomcat on my MacBook. In order to run a website with Java servlets locally.

Here are my non-developer notes, for my own future reference.

To check if Java is installed, open Terminal and type:
javac -version

In a previous session, I had already installed the Apple developer tools, which includes JDK 1.5.

Note: you’ll need to list the location where Java can be found:
export JAVA_HOME=/usr

Download and unpack the Tomcat zip files to a directory.
Open conf/tomcat-users.xml and change the user and password settings.

Go to your Tomcat directory and type ./bin/startup.sh

Open a browser and type http://localhost:8080 to see a Tomcat welcome screen.

In the final step, I modified conf/server.xml. Luckily I had my Windows setup to refer back to, or I would have been really lost at this stage…