I just upgraded my MacBook Pro to OS X Lion, and then had to spend a little while getting my development environment working again. There wasn’t too much to fix, but I didn’t find resolutions to all of my issues in one place.

So, here’s what I had to do:

  • The Java environment is not installed by default - run 'java' from the command-line, and Lion will automagically install it.

  • The (legacy) project on which I'm currently working fronts Tomcat with Apache2 using the mod_jk module. After the upgrade, this module is missing. There's nowhere that I could find to download a binary - you have to build it yourself from source.

    • The download of the source can be found at http://tomcat.apache.org/download-connectors.cgi. Instructions for building it on Lion are at http://www.malisphoto.com/tips/tomcatonosx.html.

    • To be able to build the source, you have to install XCode from the App Store. Note that the App Store only installs the XCode installer, not XCode itself. You still have to run the XCode installer. Then (and this is the part that took me a while to figure out), you have to reboot. Otherwise you get errors when running the configure script.

    • Finally, Apache was up and running, (I could see it by running netstat), but I couldn't connect to it. Further investigation revealed that I could connect to it using my '.local' machine name, but not 'localhost' or any of the other aliases that I had in /etc/hosts. The answer, which I found at http://www.justincarmony.com/blog/2011/07/27/mac-os-x-lion-etc-hosts-bugs-and-dns-resolution/, is that Lion does not allow (or rather, does not work properly with) multiple host names per line in /etc/hosts. Putting one per line fixed the problem.

      • Now, all seems to be well with my development environment (we'll see....) Hopefully, this has helped you to get yours running smoothly as well.