Getting tomcat working on Windows 7 / 2008 Server, with XAMPP

Get XAMPP from http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html.

If you have also IIS 7 installed, you may have to configure it to run on some other port. To do so, please open IIS Manager, select the Default website, or what website you have running on port 80. Then, go to Bindings, and change the http port.

Restart xampp, and go to xampp control panel, to start apache as a service.

When you navigate to Tomcat examples, it may happen that you get error 503.

This is because Tomcat is not started. Open command prompt and go to <xampp_folder>\tomcat\bin and run startup.bat. It will complain about JAVA_HOME and JRE_HOME environment variables.

Go to start menu, right click on Computer, and choose Properties. Then, Advanced System Settings, and click on Environment variables.

Add JRE_HOME and path to be the location where you installed JRE, for example: <program_files_folder>\Java\jre<version>.

Don’t put bin folder path. It will look for bin/java.exe relative to JRE_HOME.

Also, don’t use catalina_start.bat

Enjoy using tomcat samples!