I needed to setup a development environment for my advanced Java course, and had just a hell of a time getting it set up, so I thought I’d write a small tutorial. Maybe you won’t need to spend as much time on this as I did. Anyway here goes…

• First step is to download the preconfigured TomCat server from the good people at coreservlets.com http://www.coreservlets.com/Apache-Tomcat-Tutorial/tomcat6.0-files/tomcat-6.0.16-preconfigured.zip unzip it to c:\
  
• Next you need to right click on “Computer” then select “Properties” then select “Advanced System Settings” you’ll be promted by UAC to give you’re permission.  Next click on “Environmental Variables”.  This will get us to where we need to be.
• In the “Environmental Variables” window under “system variables” click “new”.  Create a new variable named  “JAVA_HOME” and set the value to where ever you keep your java jdk for me it is

C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_11

• hit “ok” but don’t leave the “Environmental Variables” area we’re not done yet.

• Next find the variable “PATH” click on it and then click “Edit”  go to the end of the text that’s there and paste in “;your java directory\bin; %PATH%” .  For me it was:

;C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_11\bin;%PATH%

• don’t forget to add the  ;   before the new text . Hit OK

• Next find the variable “CLASSPATH” click on it and then click “edit”.  Go to the end of any text that’s already there and add this text:

;.;C:\apache-tomcat-6.0.16\lib\servlet-api.jar;C:\apache-tomcat-6.0.16\lib\jsp-api.jar;C:\apache-tomcat-6.0.16\lib\el-api.jar;C:\Servlets+JSP;..;..\..

• Hit “OK” all the way out of all the windows.  Now go to your “apache-tomcat-6.0.16″  file at C:\  open the apache-tomcat-6.0.16conf\server.xml file in a text editor and change the connect port on line 72 from 80 to 8080.
• Then add a username and password to the tomcat-users.xml file in the “C:\apache-tomcat-6.0.16\conf” directory.  It should look like this:

<?xml version=’1.0′ encoding=’utf-8′?>
<tomcat-users>
<role rolename=”manager”/>
<user username=”put your username here” password=”put your password here” roles=”manager”/>
</tomcat-users>

• Save and close the file.

• To start and stop TomCat go to the “bin” directory within your tomcat file and create shortcuts for the “startup” and “shutdown” batch files.

That’s it.  Click on your startup shortcut to start TomCat, and the Shutdown shortcut to, you guessed it, shutdown TomCat.  You’ll be able to access Tomcat at “http://localhost:8080″

Cheers,

Tim