Installing Tomcat 7.0.x on OS X

Tomcat 7 is the first Apache Tomcat release to support the Servlet 3.0, JSP 2.2, and EL 2.2 specifications. Please note that Tomcat 7 requires Java 1.6 or better, but that shouldn’t be a problem, if you are running OS X 10.5 or 10.6.

On OS X 10.7 (Lion) however, Java is initially not installed anymore. You can find the installer on Apple’s support side here or follow this installation guide, provided by Adobe. Whatever you do, when opening Terminal and running java -version, you should see something like this.

java version "1.6.0_26"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_26-b03-383-11A511)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.1-b02-383, mixed mode)

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-7.0.20.tar.gz from here. I picked the tar.gz in Binary Distributions / Core section.
2. Opening/unarchiving the archive will create a folder structure something like this in you Downloads folder: (btw, this Unarchiver app is perfect for all kinds of compressed files and superior to the built-in Archive Utility.app)
   ~/Downloads/apache-tomcat-7.0.20
3. Move the unarchived distribution to /usr/local
   sudo mkdir /usr/local
sudo mv ~/Downloads/apache-tomcat-7.0.20 /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:
   sudo ln -s /usr/local/apache-tomcat-7.0.20 /Library/Tomcat
5. Change ownership of the /Libaray/Tomcat folder hierarchy:
   sudo chown -R <your_username> /Library/Tomcat
6. Make all scripts executable:
   sudo chmod +x /Library/Tomcat/bin/*.sh

Instead of using the start and stop scripts, like so:
Last login: Sun Aug 14 15:20:38 on ttys000
wpbookpro:~ 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/Home
Using CLASSPATH: /Library/Tomcat/bin/bootstrap.jar:/Library/Tomcat/bin/tomcat-juli.jar
wpbookpro:~ 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/Home
Using CLASSPATH: /Library/Tomcat/bin/bootstrap.jar:/Library/Tomcat/bin/tomcat-juli.jar
wpbookpro:~ wolf$

you may also want to check out Activata’s Tomcat Controller a tiny freeware app, providing a UI to quickly start/stop Tomcat.