I seem to need to do this every year or so, and I always forget that it is not very hard. These are my steps and settings: YMMV.

Download Tomcat (latest version, the zip — not installers)
Unzip the archive there in the downloads folder
Note: I will use the version name in my shell commands below, so you will have to edit a bit for things to work.
Open Terminal, and go to your Downloads directory:
Then move the new folder into your /Library directory:
Note: I am putting things in the /Library directory as this is where OSX also houses WebServer (/usr/local is also a great choice)
Then follow the move:
Then create a symbolic link to this new folder called “tomcat”
Now it’s installed. I know, that’s awesome. Let’s make our world a bit easier so we have start/stop aliases and set the permissions on that new directory

I live in a Bash world, so I will edit my ~/.bashrc file and add in some of the goodness:

It’s reasonable to note that my .bash_profile file looks like the following, so that the .bashrc file is executed every time:

Now for the security bit. I’m sure this is more aggressive than it needs to be but I 777 the /bin directory in my new “tomcat” install.

That’s all. It’s not simple, but it’s pretty easy. Now you can start your tomcat (see alias above — and open a new terminal window to pick up the alias). Then head over to:

http://localhost:8080

 

Deploying Web Apps (html):

So I have a lot of HTML / JS projects and I like running them quickly through my new shiny web server. To do this I simply create