Following up on Chad's excellent answer, if you get an error of "Error: Could not find or load main class" - and you spend a couple hours trying to troubleshoot it, whether your executing a shell script that starts your java app or starting it from systemd itself - and you know your classpath is 100% correct, e.g. manually running the shell script works as well as running what you have in systemd execstart. Be sure you're running things as the correct user! In my case, I had tried different users, after quite a while of troubleshooting - i finally had a hunch, put root as the user - voila, the app started correctly. After determining it was a wrong user issue, I chown -R user:user
the folder and subfolders and the app ran correctly as the specified user and group so no longer needed to run it as root (bad security).