Railo after Upgrading to OSX Mavericks

Recently I upgraded my MacBook pro to OSX Mavericks (10.9). Almost everything worked nicely until I tried to open a development page I serve using Tomcat-Railo (3.3.1 I think) and I got nothing…

So without further preamble I am going to chronicle my problems and their solutions in a few short steps to get you going with Railo on OSX Mavericks. NOTE: these instructions are if you use the OS’s inbuilt JVM, if you use a bundled JVM you probably only need to follow Step 1 and 3.

The default place of {Railo Home} is /Library/Railo/.

Step 1

DON’T PANIC!

No seriously – it’s not all that bad, you don’t need to upgrade/reinstall anything. Then Shutdown Railo using {Railo Home}/connector/railostop.sh, just to be safe (it probably isn’t running anyway).

Step 2

Install Java – any variant should do (or did for me). The issue here is that Mavericks uninstalls all your previous versions of Java quite happily and without letting you know. I installed the latest jdk which was Java Platform (JDK) 7u45.

This should then install to /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_45.jdk/

Step 3

Fix apache – see this blog post here: http://mallinson.ca/post/web-development-with-mavericks/

Step 4

Change/Add the setenv.sh script to tell railo/tomcat where java is. You find this file at {Railo Installation}/tomcat/bin/. Mine reads as follows:

<br />JAVA_HOME=/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.7.0_45.jdk/Contents/Home<br />PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin<br />CLASSPATH=$CLASSPATH:$JAVA_HOME/lib<br />

Step 5

Start Railo using {Railo Home}/connector/railostart.sh.

Your sites should be working again!