Mac OS X binary

Note

For installing on OS X with an existing application server such as Tomcat, please see the Web archive section.

An alternate way of installing GeoServer on OS X is to use the platform-independent binary. This version is a GeoServer web application bundled inside Jetty, a lightweight and portable application server. It has the advantages of working very similarly across all operating systems and is very simple to set up.

Installation

  1. Make sure you have a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed on your system. GeoServer requires a Java 8 or Java 11 environment, as provided by Adoptium macOS installers.

    Note

    For more information about Java and GeoServer compatibility, please see the section on Java Considerations.

  2. Navigate to the GeoServer Download page.

  3. Select the version of GeoServer that you wish to download. If you’re not sure, select Stable release.

  4. Select Platform Independent Binary on the download page: geoserver-2.21-SNAPSHOT-bin.zip

  5. Download the archive and unpack to the directory where you would like the program to be located.

    Note

    A suggested location would be /usr/local/geoserver.

  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, by typing the following command:

    sudo chown -R <USERNAME> /usr/local/geoserver/
    

    where USER_NAME is your user name

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

    cd geoserver/bin
    sh startup.sh
    

    Warning

    If you encounter the following error during startup, you may have some invalid JAI jars from the default Mac Java install:

    java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class javax.media.jai.JAI
    

    To fix this error, locate your Java extensions folder (Usually /System/Library/Java/Extensions and/or ~/Library/Java/Extensions), and delete the following jars:

    jai_codec-1.1.3.jar
    jai_core-1.1.3.jar
    jai_imageio-1.1.jar
    

    If you have upgraded your OS from an older version, you may not have permission to delete these jars. In this case, you will first need to disable System Integrity Protection.

  9. In a web browser, navigate to http://localhost:8080/geoserver.

If you see the GeoServer logo, then GeoServer is successfully installed.

../_images/success.png

GeoServer installed and running successfully

To shut down GeoServer, either close the persistent command-line window, or run the shutdown.sh file inside the bin directory.

Uninstallation

  1. Stop GeoServer (if it is running).

  2. Delete the directory where GeoServer is installed.