Spring Boot war file works with embedded but not with standalone Tomcat
Solution 1
The project is actually setup correctly and it turned out that the problem was with the Tomcat instance I was running. Probably something wrong with the configuration or jars. The instance is in place already for a long time, maybe things got messed up over time.
Now with a brand new Tomcat7 instance installed, the war works just fine.
Solution 2
I had this exact problem. It was because my application was built with Java 1.8 but Tomcat was running with 1.7. Everything appeared to deploy properly and there were no errors. I simply got a 404 trying to hit my services which had otherwise been fine with the embedded tomcat server. Took me ages to figure it out but it was just a case of upgrading java on the Tomcat installation.
Mathias Conradt
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Updated on June 18, 2022Comments
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Mathias Conradt about 2 years
I want to create a war file from a Spring Boot application, which I can deploy to a standalone Tomcat container, not using the embedded one.
I can create the war file and run it on its own using
"java -jar pdfjs-annotator.war"
and it works fine.I built the application using
gradle bootRepackage
(Using Gradle, Tomcat7, Java 1.7).But when I deploy the war file to a standalone Tomcat and start it, the app seems to boot without errors according to the log, but I cannot access any of the resources nor do the controller urls work.
For example, my index.html is a static html page under src/main/resources/static/index.html, which I can usually call via localhost:8080/index.html, but when deployed to a standalone Tomcat, the page does not get delivered (it's then in the war file in WEB-INF/classes/static/index.html) through that same url. And also any kind of controller mapping don't seem to work. I am getting a 404 error instead.
build.gradle:
buildscript { ext { springBootVersion = '1.2.3.RELEASE' } repositories { mavenCentral() } dependencies { classpath("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-gradle-plugin:${springBootVersion}") classpath("io.spring.gradle:dependency-management-plugin:0.5.0.RELEASE") } } apply plugin: 'java' apply plugin: 'eclipse-wtp' apply plugin: 'idea' apply plugin: 'spring-boot' apply plugin: 'io.spring.dependency-management' apply plugin: 'war' war { baseName = 'pdfjs-annotator' version = '1.0.0-SNAPSHOT' } allprojects { apply plugin: 'java' sourceCompatibility = 1.6 targetCompatibility = 1.6 } repositories { mavenCentral() } configurations { providedRuntime } dependencies { compile("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-data-jpa") compile("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-data-rest") compile("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web") runtime("mysql:mysql-connector-java") providedRuntime("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-tomcat") testCompile("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-test") compile ('org.hibernate.javax.persistence:hibernate-jpa-2.0-api:1.0.1.Final') } eclipse { classpath { containers.remove('org.eclipse.jdt.launching.JRE_CONTAINER') containers 'org.eclipse.jdt.launching.JRE_CONTAINER/org.eclipse.jdt.internal.debug.ui.launcher.StandardVMType/JavaSE-1.7' } } task wrapper(type: Wrapper) { gradleVersion = '2.3' }
My main application class:
@EnableJpaRepositories @SpringBootApplication public class PdfAnnotator extends SpringBootServletInitializer { public static void main(String[] args) { SpringApplication.run(PdfAnnotator.class, args); } @Override protected SpringApplicationBuilder configure(SpringApplicationBuilder application) { return application.sources(PdfAnnotator.class); } }
When I look into the exploded war, I do see the following META-INF/MANIFEST.MF:
Manifest-Version: 1.0 Start-Class: com.mypackage.pdfcomment.PdfAnnotator Spring-Boot-Version: 1.2.3.RELEASE Main-Class: org.springframework.boot.loader.WarLauncher
The gradle build process usually generated two war artifacts, one named .war and one named .war.original - the .war is the one that holds proper MANIFEST.MF entries and it's the one I used to deploy to the standalone Tomcat.
What's missing? I already checked other questions here on SO:
and also the Spring Boot docs, but could not find a hint of what's wrong.
* === Update === *
I installed a brand new Tomcat7, deployed the war file there, and everything's working fine. Seemed to be some issue with the Tomcat instance/configuration I had running. Not sure what exactly the issue was, but I won't bother to check it further since it's working fine now with the new Tomcat.