Thx everyone for the great replies. I decided to take Konstantin Kolinko's advice and start a new installation from scratch using tomcat-8.5.32.
I have had some success, but still can't deploy WARS. Here is what I did: == Step 1: Installing Tomcat per se == I used the instructions on this page: https://wolfpaulus.com/mac/tomcat/ * Download the zip file and unzip it on your HD under /usr/local/apache-tomcat-N.N.N (where N.N.N is the version number). ** Note: In the rest of this document, that directory will be referred to [CATALINA_HOME]. * Create a symlink /Library/Tomcat to make managing future versions easier: sudo rm -f /Library/Tomcat sudo ln -s [CATALINA_HOME] /Library/Tomcat * Change ownership of /Library/Tomcat sudo chown -R <your_username> /Library/Tomcat * Make all scripts executable sudo chmod +x /Library/Tomcat/bin/*.sh * Now, I can start/stop tomcat as follows: /Library/Tomcat/bin/startup.sh /Library/Tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh ** IMPORTANT: DON’T RUN THOSE SCRIPTS WITH SUDO!!! Especially ‘startup.sh’, as this will end up creating a bunch of temporay dirs and files that will be owned by ROOT, and cannot be written unless you start Tomcat as ROOT. * Test the installation by: ** Starting Tomcat with startup.sh ** Pointing my browser at http://localhost:8080/. ** I see the Tomcat home page no problem == Step 2: Configuring the Tomcat Manager Apps == * Edit the file /Library/Tomcat/conf/tomcat-users.xml, and add the following lines inside the <tomcat-users> tag pair: <role rolename="admin-gui"/> <role rolename="manager-gui"/> <user username="admin" password="PASSWORD" roles="admin-gui,manager-gui"/> * Shutdown and re-start Tomcat * At this point, I can click on any of the following buttons: 'Server Status', 'Manager' App, 'Host Manager' and once I enter the user and passwords I specified in <tomcat-users>, I get to see the corresponding page. ** On 'Manager App', I was able to start, stop, re-deploy EXISTING apps. ** BUT.... *** When I tried to deploy a new WAR file, I got: This site can’t be reached The connection was reset. Try: Checking the connection Checking the proxy and the firewall ERR_CONNECTION_RESET After a bit of reading, it seems that this is because the WAR file I was deploying was larger than the maximum size allowed. I fixed that by editing /Library/Tomcat/webapps/manager/WEB-INF/web.xml, and changing the size in the following tags: <multipart-config> <max-file-size>50000000 </max-file-size> <max-request-size>50000000 </max-request-size> <file-size-threshold>0</file-size-threshold> </multipart-config> And now, all seem to work fine. Again, thanks to everyone who pitched in with some advice. It was really helpful. Alain