Installing Tomcat on Your Machine as a Command-Line Application

Most application developers need to run Tomcat only as a command-line application and usually only from their IDE. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Download the architecture-appropriate Windows zip (if you use Windows) or the non-Windows zip (if you use anything else) from the Tomcat 8.0 download page and unzip the directory.

2. Place the contents of the Tomcat directory in this zip file into the folder C:\Tomcat 8.0 on your local machine (or into the appropriate directory for a server in your operating system). For example, the webapps directory should now be located at C:\Tomcat 8.0\webapps.

3. If you use Windows 7 or newer, you need to change some permissions to make Tomcat accessible from your IDE. Right-click the Apache Software Foundation directory in C: and click Properties. On the Security tab, click the Edit button. Add your user or the Users group, and give that entry full control over the directory.

4. To configure Tomcat for its first use, start by opening the file conf/tomcat-users.xml in your favorite text editor. Place the following tag between the <tomcat-users> </tomcat-users> XML tags:
<user username="admin" password="admin" roles="manager-gui,admin-gui" />

5. Open the conf/web.xml file. Search the file for the text org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet. Below the tag that contains this text are two <init-param> tags. Add the following init parameters below the existing init parameters:
<init-param>
     <param-name>compilerSourceVM</param-name>
     <param-value>1.8</param-value>
</init-param>
<init-param>
     <param-name>compilerTargetVM</param-name>
     <param-value>1.8</param-value>
</init-param>
By default, Tomcat 8.0 compiles JavaServer Pages files with Java SE 6 language support even if it runs on Java SE 8. These new Servlet init parameters instruct Tomcat to compile JSP files with Java SE 8 language features, instead.

6. After you make these changes and save these files, you should now be ready to start up Tomcat and make sure that it runs properly. Open up a command prompt and change your directory to the Tomcat home directory (C:\Tomcat 8.0).

7. Type the command echo %JAVA_HOME% (or echo $JAVA_HOME on a non-Windows operating system) and press Enter to check whether the JAVA_HOME environmental variable is properly set to your Java Development Kit (JDK) home directory. If it is not, configure the environmental variable, and then log out and back in before proceeding. Tomcat cannot run without this variable properly set.

8. Type the command bin\startup.bat (or bin/startup.sh if you do not use Windows) and press Enter. A Java console window should open showing the output of the running Tomcat process. After a few seconds, you should see the message “INFO [main] org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.start Server startup in 1827 ms” or something similar in the console window. This means Tomcat has started properly.

9. Open your favorite Web browser and navigate to http://localhost:8080/. You should see a page that looks like Figure below. This means that Tomcat is running and JSPs are compiling properly with Java SE 8. If this screen does not come up or you observe an error in the Java console, you need to check the preceding steps and possibly consult the Tomcat documentation.

When you finish using Tomcat, you can stop it by running the command bin\shutdown.bat (or bin/shutdown.sh) in the command prompt in the Tomcat 8.0 home directory. The Java console window should close, and Tomcat will stop.