Today I started to install GeoServer, in preparation for some demos next week. I do almost all of my work on a Macbook, so this is a great opportunity to enjoy the strengths of a cross-platform Java app like Geoserver. I have limited Java experience and certainly have never used Tomcat for anything except GeoServer and GeoNetwork in the past. JBoss - what's that?

Resources

1. GeoServer web site
2. GeoServer MacOSX Install Guide
3. Latest GeoServer war file from download page

Installing Tomcat

For many of my service focused applications I try to use DarwinPorts, so I tried this for Tomcat as well. It's nice to run the install command and walk away until it is done building.

1. To get Tomcat up and running I ran:

  sudo port install tomcat5

Unfortunately one of the dependencies wasn't being found very easily and the install failed after a few minutes or trying and re-trying to install the apache-ant package:

  --->  Fetching apache-ant
  --->  Attempting to fetch apache-ant-1.6.5-bin.tar.bz2 from http://www.apache.org/dist/ant/binaries
  --->  Attempting to fetch apache-ant-1.6.5-bin.tar.bz2 from ftp://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/apache/dist/ant/binaries
  ...
  Error: Target com.apple.fetch returned: fetch failed

Turns out that that my port environment is so old that it was looking for an outdated version of apache-ant. This was fixed by running the sync command:

  sudo port sync

.. and then re-running the above install command:and then re-running the above install command. This got the process started again and it ran for about an hour and downloaded/built and installed several packages (about a dozen).

To start tomcat I ran:

 sudo /opt/local/share/java/tomcat5/bin/tomcatctl start

and it output its status as:

 conf_setup.sh: file conf/catalina.policy is missing; copying conf/catalina.policy.sample to its place.
 conf_setup.sh: file conf/catalina.properties is missing; copying conf/catalina.properties.sample to its place.
 conf_setup.sh: file conf/server.xml is missing; copying conf/server.xml.sample to its place.
 conf_setup.sh: file conf/tomcat-users.xml is missing; copying conf/tomcat-users.xml.sample to its place.
 conf_setup.sh: file conf/web.xml is missing; copying conf/web.xml.sample to its place.
 conf_setup.sh: file conf/setenv.local is missing; copying conf/setenv.local.sample to its place.
 Starting Tomcat.... started. (pid 25009)

Install GeoServer war file

For tomcat to find the GeoServer install file you must place it in the Tomcat webapps folder:

  sudo cp geoserver.war /opt/local/share/java/tomcat5/webapps/

then restart the Tomcat server:

 sudo /opt/local/share/java/tomcat5/bin/tomcatctl start
 Starting Tomcat.... started. (pid 20900)

Conveniently the port installer tells you how to set this up to launch tomcat on startup:

 sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.tomcat5.plist

Launch GeoServer

I was then able to access GeoServer in the web browser by going to:

 http://localhost:8080/geoserver

Note that localhost is the default Mac instance of Apache. And localhost:8080 is the Tomcat web server and the above url is GeoServer running in Tomcat.