I spent some time with a colleague from South Africa yesterday. He’s a long-time Windows user that writes in Java. He has a new MacBook Pro, and we scratched our head why Apache+mod_jk+Tomcat was blowing up on him.
JAVA_HOME
The first thing we had to get right was the JAVA_HOME variable. If it’s not set right when compiling mod_jk, you’re out of luck. On OS X there is a program that spits out the right value. We put the following in his ~/.profile. Please note the back ticks (accents graves) to run the java_home program.
export JAVA_HOME=`/usr/libexec/java_home`
mod_jk
With $JAVA_HOME set correctly, compiling mod_jk was straightforward. Download the mod_mod_jk tarball, unpack it, and change directories to the native subdirectory. The following should work cleanly.
$ ./configure --with-apxs=/usr/sbin/apxs $ make clean ; make $ sudo make install
Apache Configuration File
Be aware that OS X Lion has some lines (commented out) for support for mod_jk. Be sure to uncomment those lines. Previous versions of OS X don’t have these lines, so you’ll just add the load module directive and Jk* commands in the usual places.
That’s it, really. Once JAVA_HOME and the Apache configuration file were straightened out, things worked.