Mac OS X Binary

Note

This section is for the OS-independent binary. Please see the section on the Mac OS X for the wizard-based installer for OS X.

The most common way to install GeoServer is using the OS-independent binary. This version is a GeoServer web application (webapp) bundled inside Jetty, a lightweight servlet container system. It has the advantages of working very similarly across all operating systems plus being very simple to set up.

Installation

  1. Navigate to the GeoServer Download page and click your preferred GeoServer version–Stable, Maintenance or Development. In “Nightly” builds are provided to help test the latest features of bug fixes.

  2. On the resulting page, download and save the Binary (OS independent) format of your preferred GeoServer version.

    Note

    Download GeoServer wherever you find appropriate. In this example we download the GeoServer archive to the Desktop. If GeoServer is in a different location, simply replace Desktop in the following command to your own folder path.

  3. After saving the Geoserver archive, move to the location of your download, by first opening a terminal window ( Applications‣Utitlies‣Terminal) and then typing the following command:

    cd Desktop/

  4. Confirm that you are in the right directory by listing its contents. You should see your specific GeoServer archive (e.g., GeoServer-2.0-RC1-bin.zip) by typing:

    ls -l

  5. Unzip geoserver-2.0-RC1.zip to /usr/local/geoserver with the following two commands:

    unzip $geoserver-2.0-RC1.zip  .
sudo mv geoserver-2.0-RC1/  geoserver

    Note

    Notice the . in the first command. This means the archive will unzip in the current directory.

  6. Add an environment variable to save the location of GeoServer by typing the following command:

    echo "export GEOSERVER_HOME=/usr/local/geoserver" >> ~/.profile
. ~/.profile

  7. Make yourself the owner of the geoserver folder. Type the following command in the terminal window, replacing USER_NAME with your own username :

    sudo chown -R USER_NAME /usr/local/geoserver/

  8. Start GeoServer by changing into the directory geoserver/bin and executing the startup.sh script:

    cd geoserver-1.7.0/bin
sh startup.sh

  9. Visit http://localhost:8080/geoserver in a web browser.