Tomcat

The Apache Tomcat® software is an open source implementation of the Jakarta Servlet, Jakarta Server Pages, Jakarta Expression Language, Jakarta WebSocket, Jakarta Annotations and Jakarta Authentication specifications. These specifications are part of the Jakarta EE platform.

There are several ways to install Tomcat on your computer, and it is strongly recommended to download in compressed binary package directly instead of an installation program.

Step 1: Download. Go to Tomcat 9 Software Downloads, and scroll to Binary Distributions. If you are on Windows, click 64-bit Windows zip. If you are on Linux/MacOS, click zip or tar.gz. Then your web browser would download the binary package automatically, and you can save it to any place (e.g., Download folder) you like.

Step 2: Un-compress. Extract the compressed package to any place you like. By default, the extracted folder is apache-tomcat-9.0.56.

Cool! That is all you need to do. Some tutorials may even ask you to register a service for Tomcat, but it is optional if you don't understand what it is doing. Figure A.1 shows what you will see inside apache-tomcat-9.0.56 folder.

Figure A.1 The contents of Tomcat.

A note for Linux/MacOS

If the IntelliJ IDEA raises an error containing "permission denied" when you try to run a web application using Tomcat, it can be fixed by adding execute permission for .sh files under the bin folder of Tomcat home. Open the terminal, change the directory to Tomcat home, and then

chmod u+x bin/*.sh