7 comments on »Installing Tomcat 8 on OS X Yosemite«

1. 

   sudo chown -R /Library/Tomcat
   I had to explicitly put specify root to make it work. sudo chown -R root /Library/Tomcat

   sudo chmod +x /Library/Tomcat/bin/*.sh
   I couldn’t make it work. It throws error:
   chown: +x: illegal user name

   I am working on MAC OS X El Capitan and using apache-tomcat-8.0.26

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     Ah, the steps in the article worked for me on Yosemite. Thank you for sharing this!

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       This worked perfectly fine for me in El Capitan.

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2. 

   Thanks a lot!

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     You are welcome – happy to help! :-)

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3. 

   Hi Bo, this page is really quite helpful. However, the change of ownership command can’t ever work, even on Yosemite, which I am also using.

   Richards-MacBook-Pro:Tomcat rwilliams$ sw_vers -productVersion
   10.10.5
   Richards-MacBook-Pro:Tomcat rwilliams$ pwd
   /Library/Tomcat
   Richards-MacBook-Pro:Tomcat rwilliams$ sudo chown -R /Library/Tomcat
   usage: chown [-fhv] [-R [-H | -L | -P]] owner[:group] file ...
          chown [-fhv] [-R [-H | -L | -P]] :group file ...
   

   The other command works, but because the default in “chmod” is to apply the change to all levels of User, Group, and World (“ugw”). I’m searching forums because I want to know what the correct change is, but I’m experienced enough to be cautious of this being the appropriate choices, since giving Execute privilege to everyone on the Catalina shell scripts is probably a huge security no-no.

   For the super-newbies, here’s some background explanation about why we see this issue and have to try and solve it:

   When you unpack the gz.zip archive, the distribution has the development project’s users names/groups on the files. Your systems won’t have those same usernames, so you have to change the ownership. Also, in your system the Groups will likely be different. So you find yourself using “sudo” to get Tomcat to Startup and Shutdown … but you don’t really want to do that because, maybe, your use-case won’t be allowed to use sudo.

   So, if you want to start Tomcat without using Sudo, you have to change these permissions, and if you don’t it’ll say touch: /Library/Tomcat/logs/catalina.out: Permission denied.

   That’s because when a user tries just “./startup.sh”, the script tries to run as whatever user you happen to be logged-in as. That user does not have some critical permissions: For instance, they don’t have +w on /Library/Tomcat/logs, so the Catalina startup.sh can’t perform a “touch” on the /…/logs/catalina.out file. Likewise, without the +x (Execute) permissions, starting Tomcat without Sudo will throw touch: /Library/Tomcat/logs/catalina.out: Permission denied.

   The Startup only tries to “touch” (create) that file if the file does not already exist, because the rest of the Tomcat server behaviors will try to append to the log file … and if the file is missing those log-write commands will fail with “file not found” I/O errors.

   So I, like many other readers, don’t know what the correct ownership/permission target – User, or Group, needs to be given those permission? Yes, I can guess, and I can give huge-permissions to the whole world and get it going … but that’s not the point: What we’re all trying to figure is, what is the correct level of permissions and to whom?

   … and so the search for the specific (and correct) answer goes on :)

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     Hello Richard,

     Thank you very, very much for your detailed comment! Actually, those commands worked perfectly well on my MacBook running OS X Yosemite at the time of the writing. Either way, you are right about the permissions. The reason why I am so “generous” with the permissions is two-fold; firstly, given that this article is related to OS X, the target audience is developers needing to install this on their development machines. In theory, this may not be the case, and I might have to make this more clear in the article. Also, I am by no means a UNIX guru, so this was just what worked for me.

     My particular setup has always been shielded off from the Internet, so I haven’t really thought much about this.

     Thanks a lot for the feedback!

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