This guide tutorial will cover how to set up IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate to work with Apache Tomcat, herein referred to simply as Tomcat. We will create a new project that uses Tomcat and then talk about using Tomcat in IntelliJ IDEA so you can benefit from the rich integration capabilities.

To use Tomcat with IntelliJ IDEA, it needs to be installed on your machine. If you don’t already have Tomcat installed, you can download the latest version, which at the time of writing, is Tomcat 10. Once you have downloaded the appropriate file for your operating system, unzip it and place the folder in your chosen location. You will need to point to the folder from IntelliJ IDEA when the time comes.