launching .war servlet in tomcat8

Question

I have a servlet app I'm trying to deploy to my local tomcat instance. at first I tried deploying using the tomcat manager app but was told there was an easier way - simply dropping the .war in the webapps-folder.(/etc/tomcat8/webapps/ on my machine)

upon restarting the tomcat service however I get an error:

    Job for tomcat8.service failed because the control process exited with error code. See "systemctl status tomcat8.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.

journalctl -xe output follows:

......
session opened for user root by martini(uid=0)
mar 29 14:23:17 martini-XPS-13-9350 polkitd(authority=local)[737]: Registered Authentication Agent for unix-process:9719:7772642 (system bus name :1.160 [/usr/bin/pkttyagent --notify-fd 5 --fallback], object path /org/freedesktop/PolicyKit1/AuthenticationAgent, locale en_US.UTF-8)
mar 29 14:23:17 martini-XPS-13-9350 systemd[1]: Stopped LSB: Start Tomcat..
-- Subject: Unit tomcat8.service has finished shutting down
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
-- 
-- Unit tomcat8.service has finished shutting down.
mar 29 14:23:17 martini-XPS-13-9350 systemd[1]: Starting LSB: Start Tomcat....
-- Subject: Unit tomcat8.service has begun start-up
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
-- 
-- Unit tomcat8.service has begun starting up.
mar 29 14:23:17 martini-XPS-13-9350 tomcat8[9728]: * Starting Tomcat servlet engine tomcat8
mar 29 14:23:22 martini-XPS-13-9350 tomcat8[9728]: ...fail!
mar 29 14:23:22 martini-XPS-13-9350 systemd[1]: tomcat8.service: Control process exited, code=exited status=1
mar 29 14:23:22 martini-XPS-13-9350 systemd[1]: Failed to start LSB: Start Tomcat..
-- Subject: Unit tomcat8.service has failed
-- Defined-By: systemd
-- Support: http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
-- 
-- Unit tomcat8.service has failed.
-- 
-- The result is failed.
mar 29 14:23:22 martini-XPS-13-9350 systemd[1]: tomcat8.service: Unit entered failed state.
mar 29 14:23:22 martini-XPS-13-9350 systemd[1]: tomcat8.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
mar 29 14:23:22 martini-XPS-13-9350 polkitd(authority=local)[737]: Unregistered Authentication Agent for unix-process:9719:7772642 (system bus name :1.160, object path /org/freedesktop/PolicyKit1/AuthenticationAgent, locale en_US.UTF-8) (disconnected from bus)
mar 29 14:23:22 martini-XPS-13-9350 sudo[9718]: pam_unix(sudo:session): session closed for user root

I suspect this is a configuration-error on my local environment (which is newly installed), but cant figure out what exactly it might be! I tried reinstalling, but after a while I ended up in this same dead-end again...any thoughts?

Edit: here is the output from systemctl status tomcat8.service:

➜  ~ systemctl status tomcat8.service
● tomcat8.service - LSB: Start Tomcat.
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/tomcat8)
   Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since tis 2016-03-29 17:05:45 CEST; 14s ago
     Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
  Process: 3724 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/tomcat8 start (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)

mar 29 17:05:40 martini-XPS-13-9350 systemd[1]: Stopped LSB: Start Tomcat..
mar 29 17:05:40 martini-XPS-13-9350 systemd[1]: Starting LSB: Start Tomcat....
mar 29 17:05:40 martini-XPS-13-9350 tomcat8[3724]: * Starting Tomcat servlet engine tomcat8
mar 29 17:05:45 martini-XPS-13-9350 tomcat8[3724]: ...fail!
mar 29 17:05:45 martini-XPS-13-9350 systemd[1]: tomcat8.service: Control process exited, code=exited status=1
mar 29 17:05:45 martini-XPS-13-9350 systemd[1]: Failed to start LSB: Start Tomcat..
mar 29 17:05:45 martini-XPS-13-9350 systemd[1]: tomcat8.service: Unit entered failed state.
mar 29 17:05:45 martini-XPS-13-9350 systemd[1]: tomcat8.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
➜  ~

Few things to start with : 1. Without the new war file in webapps does tomcat start? 2. Did you check the tomcat logs present in 'logs' directory in tomcat, Catalina.log and localhost log file. — Himanshu Bhardwaj, Mar 29 '16 at 16:26
catalina.log held the answers! didn't know about this one before! — Anders Martini, Mar 30 '16 at 07:03

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 30 '16 at 07:10

I found the terminal output to be slightly misleading here. Apparently there is a logfile called Catalina.log (defaults to /var/lib/tomcat8/conf/catalina.log on ubuntu). This is where the real reason for my troubles was revealed. apparently there was a problem in my server.xml configuration (the file was missing).

broader lesson here is - check your catalina.log when in trouble with tomcat!

launching .war servlet in tomcat8

1 Answers1