Install Tomcat On Server (Mac & Linux)

How To Develop And Deploy Your Web App (Angular + Tomcat Server + MySQL) — Part 2

3 min readJul 26, 2020

Part 1: Develop First Web Page With Angular
Part 2: Install Tomcat On Server (Mac & Linux)
Part 3: Develop Java API Running On Tomcat Server
Part 4: Install MySQL And Create Database (Local & Remote Server)
Part 5: Connect To MySQL Database in Java API and Deploy It On Tomcat Server (Local Server & Remote Server)

In part 1, I introduce how to build the frontend page. In this part, I will show you how to install Tomcat on server.

Prerequisites
Introduction
Install Tomcat On Server (Mac)
Install Tomcat On Server (Linux)
Conclution

Prerequisites

A Linux server: CentOS 7 (How to own your VPS? Check my another article to Setup your VPS)
My local computer is MacOS
Java on remote server (Java version: 1.8)
Tomcat on remote server (Tomcat version: 7.0.76)

Note: You can choose other code editors or version you like. Those just for your reference.

Introduction

During the project development period, I usually deploy on my local computer first to test the functions. I need to create the same running environment of my remote server on my local computer. Which means my local computer and remote computer both have Tomcat and MySQL database. Once I finish my backend program, I will deploy it on remote server from my local computer.

There’s a slightly difference in the deployment process between local computer (Mac) and remote computer (Linux):

Installation steps are different
Tomcat commands are different

// Mac
/* /Libray/Tomcat is your Tomcat directory */
$ /Library/Tomcat/bin/startup.sh   # start tomcat
$ /Library/Tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh  # stop tomcat// Linux CentOS
$ systemctl start tomcat           # start tomcat
$ systemctl stop tomcat            # stop tomcat
$ systemctl status tomcat          # check tomcat status

Install Tomcat On Server (Mac)

Please follow this tutorial to install Tomcat on Mac.

Notes:

Open your browser and enter http://localhost:8080 to check whether Tomcat server starts successfully:

Tomcat starts successfully on local server

If you can’t open this page, try /Library/Tomcat/startup.sh to start Tomcat.

Install Tomcat On Server (Linux)

Please follow this tutorial video to install Tomcat.

Notes:

First of all, make sure you have java on remote server. (Use java -version to check.)
Recommand to use yum to install on CentOS.
yum install tomcat tomcat-webapps tomcat-admin-webapps, include three of them are enough.
In the tutorial video (Begins at 1:42), this admin settings step is optional because we just use the default root username and null password in this article. Of course, you can set a username and password if you like. Just make sure this username and password will be used in the database connection step.
Do not execute the systemctl start tomcat command if you have started your tomcat. To be safe, check your tomcat running status first before you start tomcat using systemctl status tomcat: