Installing Apache tomcat on Mac OS X Lion using homebrew

It is hard to overestimate how much I am grateful for the homebrew Mac OS X package manager.

Today I needed to setup Apache Tomcat on a OS X Lion machine. I already have homebrew installed and have used it to install a bunch of stuff.

All that is needed is:
$ brew install tomcat

I'll admit that this failed the first time that I tried it but running 'brew update' and then 'brew install tomcat' sorted that out - I guess if you've not used it for a while you should run 'brew update' as it is still evolving quite rapildly.

That installs the code into /usr/local/Cellar/tomcat/7.0.28

To start/stop the server from the command line you use the catalina shell script
$ /usr/local/Cellar/tomcat/7.0.28/bin/catalina run
[...]
$ /usr/local/Cellar/tomcat/7.0.28/bin/catalina stop


When it is running you can go to http://localhost:8080 and see a default tomcat information page with lots more info.


For me that default port is a problem as it is also the default for my nginx installation. But changing it is easy enough. Edit /usr/local/Cellar/tomcat/7.0.28/libexec/conf/server.xml and replace the instances of 808 with your preferred port. Rerun catalina and then go to your preferred URL.


For my purposes I want to start and stop the server manually but check the documents for how to link it to an instance of Apache.