Getting Apache Tomcat up and running in Mac OS 10.9

Question

I have installed Apache Tomcat on my Macbook Pro and run the startup script...

$ ./startup.sh
Using CATALINA_BASE:   /Library/Tomcat/Home
Using CATALINA_HOME:   /Library/Tomcat/Home
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /Library/Tomcat/Home/temp
Using JRE_HOME:        /Library/Java
Using CLASSPATH:       /Library/Tomcat/Home/bin/bootstrap.jar:/Library/Tomcat/Home/bin/tomcat-juli.jar
Tomcat started.

browsing to localhost in any browser shows the "It Works!" page (default for Apache on Mac I think) but browsing to localhost:8080 just shows "Unable to connect..."

Running

netstat -anp tcp | grep 8080

shows that nothing is listening on port 8080. Can anyone help me sort this out?

EDIT: I have checked the logs directory and only a catalina.out was created. Here are the contents

$ cat /Library/Tomcat/Home/logs/catalina.out
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: org/apache/catalina/startup/Bootstrap : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClassCond(ClassLoader.java:637)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:621)
    at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:141)
    at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:283)
    at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$000(URLClassLoader.java:58)
    at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:197)
    at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
    at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:306)
    at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:247)

I tried updating to the latest JDK and JRE but I am still getting this when trying to start Tomcat

Answer 1

In server.xml check if you have configured port="8080" instead of 80:

<Connector 
  port="8080" 
  protocol="HTTP/1.1"
  connectionTimeout="20000"
  URIEncoding="UTF-8"
  redirectPort="8443" />