You could be wondering why I don’t just use a fancy IDE, like Eclipse to do all this for me? Well… I’ve tried. But… I just can’t ‘like’ Eclipse. I admit, I was very impressed with it – tons of functionallity, but in the end, I just couldn’t give up using the beautiful TextMate. Eclipse felt cluttered and I was claustrophobic using it.

Pathetic excuse I know, but I need something I can get on and work with.

Anyway – enough side-tracking on talk of Eclipse.

Ant. Java compiling made easy. Bring on Tomcat extension tasks with it and that saves me another aspirin for working on my Tomcat coursework which is to develop a web based quiz. To install the Tomcat tasks for Ant on Mac OS X, you just need to copy them over:

cp /usr/local/apache-tomcat-5.5.16/server/lib/catalina-ant.jar /Developer/Java/Ant/lib

Note that this installs the Tomcat tasks to the default Developer Tools install of Ant. If you’ve installed Ant manually, you’ll need to change the paths above accordingly.

Once the .jar is copied over, in your build.xml files for your various projects, you’ll need to include the following tags:

<taskdef name="deploy" classname="org.apache.catalina.ant.DeployTask" />
<taskdef name="undeploy" classname="org.apache.catalina.ant.UndeployTask" />

These task definitions only cover deploy and undeploy tasks. To use them in your project:

<target name="undeploy">    
    <undeploy url="${tomcat.manager}"
        username="${tomcat.username}"
        password="${tomcat.password}"
        path="/yourwebapp" />
</target>

Where tomcat.manager is your URL to your Tomcat manager. Usually http://localhost:8080/manager. tomcat.username and tomcat.password are self-explanatory. Then just substitute yourwebapp with the name of your tomcat application directory located inside the webapp directory. For my current coursework, this is webquiz.

The deploy task is very similar:

<target name="deploy" depends="war">
    <deploy url="${tomcat.manager}"
        username="${tomcat.username}"
        password="${tomcat.password}"
        path="/${ant.project.name}"
        update="true"
        localWar="${war.dir}/${ant.project.name}.war" />
</target>

I have another target that creates a WAR file of my entire web application. This is what I’ll use to deploy my application. The only additional attributes in the deploy task are update and localWar. update will replace an existing application if it already exists so that you have the latest working copy. localWar is the location of the WAR file you want to deploy.

Simple. Hope I’ve explained this clear enough.

As of writing this, I’m having some trouble getting this working with my iBook, which I assumed had the same set-up as my Intel iMac – of which, the above tasks are working perfectly.

sudo mv ~/Desktop/apache-tomcat-5.5.15 /usr/local/

That’s all you need to do to actually install Tomcat–nice and simple. Now to create some start and stop scripts…

cd /usr/local/bin
sudo nano start_tomcat

Enter the following and save:

#!/bin/sh
export CATALINA_HOME=/usr/local/apache-tomcat-5.5.15
export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home
$CATALINA_HOME/bin/startup.sh

Now a stop script:

sudo nano stop_tomcat

Enter the following:

#!/bin/sh
export CATALINA_HOME=/usr/local/apache-tomcat-5.5.15
export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home
$CATALINA_HOME/bin/shutdown.sh

Voila! Now to start Tomcat, use /usr/local/bin/start_tomcat and to stop it use /usr/local/bin/stop_tomcat.

If you have /usr/local/bin included in your PATH environment variable, then you can start and stop Tomcat using start_tomcat and stop_tomcat respectively straight from the Terminal.

When Tomcat is started, you can see the installation by going to http://localhost:8080/. In order to manage Tomcat, you’ll need to modify the tomcat-users.xml file.

cd /usr/local/apache-tomcat-5.5.15/conf
sudo nano tomcat-users.xml

Inside this file, modify it so it includes the following tags:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<tomcat-users>
  <role rolename="manager"/>
  <role rolename="admin"/>
  <user username="davidwinter" password="123" roles="admin,manager"/>
</tomcat-users>

Where davidwinter is the username you want to use, and 123 being the password you desire.

You can then manage your Tomcat applications using this link; http://localhost:8080/manager/html.