Installing Tomcat and Lucee on Mac OS X using the Lucee WAR file

Download a copy of Apache Tomcat 8.5 core, available at the Tomcat download page.

Install Tomcat by extracting the downloaded archive. Extract the archive to your home folder, /Users/. For convenience, you can rename the resulting folder from //apache-tomcat-8.5.29// to //tomcat//.

  1. Go into tomcat/webapps/. Delete the /ROOT/ folder and /ROOT.war/.

  2. Next, go to the Lucee download page and download the latest lucee war file.

  3. Rename the lucee war file to /ROOT.war/ (note the capitalization).

  4. Copy the renamed /ROOT.war/ file into tomcat/webapps/.

  5. Create a startup.sh file in tomcat/ with the following contents, replacing "<username>" with your username to provide the literal path:

# set the path to Tomcat binaries export CATALINA_HOME=/Users/<username>/tomcat9

# set the path to the instance config, i.e. current directory if this file is in the CATALINA_BASE directory export CATALINA_BASE=/Users/<username>/tomcat9

EXECUTABLE=${CATALINA_HOME}/bin/catalina.sh exec $EXECUTABLE run

  1. In Terminal, cd into the tomcat directory and then execute the following command to start Lucee

./startup.sh

  1. Next, open a web browser to localhost:8080/lucee/admin/web.cfm. You should see the Lucee Web admin login screen. Lucee is now installed.

  2. You may want to install mod_cfml to use Apache

Next Steps

From this point you can configure your Tomcat instance and set up your applications in Lucee.