Apache Tomcat 5.5 Installation on Mac OS-X Leopard 10.5.x

I needed to get Apache Tomcat 5.5 running on my Mac to experiment with Orbeon.

This was the most helpful information that I found, but I needed some extra steps.

1. Download Apache Tomcat 5.5 from here. Use the zip file since, for some reason, the README says that the tar shipped with OS-X is no good.

2. Move the downloaded zip file to where you want to unpack it. I choose my home directory which is /Users/phil

3. Open it and it should expand into a directory like /Users/phil/apache-tomcat-5.5.28

4. Browse to /Users/phil/apache-tomcat-5.5.28/bin

5. Open startup.sh with TextEdit.app

6. Add the following lines to the file after the EXECUTABLE line:

export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5/Home
export CATALINA_HOME=/Users/phil/apache-tomcat-5.5.28

You will need to use the location where you placed the tomcat directory rather than mine.

7. I had to do three more things at this point to make all the shell (.sh) file executable.

1. Open Terminal.app
2. cd /Users/phil/apache-tomcat-5.5.28/bin
3. chmod u+x *.sh

8. Start tomcat this way:

./startup

I had another problem at this point. I already had an eXist server running on port 8080. eXist is included in Orbeon as well.

To change the port I needed to open /Users/phil/apache-tomcat-5.5.28/conf/server.xml and edit the line containing

Connector port="8080" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192

I changed the 8080 to 8180. You can choose almost any other port if that suits you situation better.

I still couldn't get tomcat to run. I found that it was already running so I had to kill it and then restart it.

I used the following command in Terminal to locate the program:

ps | grep tomcat

This generated the following lines. Ignore the 'grep tomcat' one and note the number of the second line - the 838 in my case.

3821 ttys000 0:00.00 grep tomcat
838 ttys007 0:10.71 /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5/Home/bin/java -Djava.util.logging.config.file=/Users/phil/apache-tomcat-5.5.28/conf/logging.properties -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager -Djava.endorsed.dirs=/Users/phil/apache-tomcat-5.5.28/common/endorsed -classpath /Users/phil/apache-tomcat-5.5.28/bin/bootstrap.jar -Dcatalina.base=/Users/phil/apache-tomcat-5.5.28 -Dcatalina.home=/Users/phil/apache-tomcat-5.5.28 -Djava.io.tmpdir=/Users/phil/apache-tomcat-5.5.28/temp org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap start

Now I had to kill the server with this command:

kill 838

Now I could restart tomcat and see the default home page.

I then pointed my browser to http://localhost:8180 and the default page was displayed.