[tomcat] Tomcat: LifecycleException when deploying

I just downloaded the Tomcat 7.0.23 package on my Ubuntu 11.10.

I followed the instructions on a Google API website to deploy their example webapp. It basically consists of jar files placed in the WEB-INF/lib directory and a web.xml file placed in the WEB-INF directory.

Yet the app is not automatically deployed and when trying to force the server to deploy it through the manager gui, I get the following message:

FAIL - Application at context path /myWebApp could not be started
FAIL - Encountered exception org.apache.catalina.LifecycleException: 
         Failed to start component 
         [StandardEngine[Catalina].StandardHost[localhost].StandardContext[/myWebApp]]

However, the JSP examples provided with Tomcat do work!

I have the same problem on Tomcat6.

So what did I do wrong ? Is this a permission problem ? (I even try to change the mod of all files to 777).

This question is related to tomcat lifecycleexception

The answer is


I done in same way and its working now. Actually web.xml file having wrong url-pattern. you can remove one url-pattern either annotation form servlet or web.xml.It worked for me.


For me the problem was caused by checking the project into an other directory from Git. Choosing the same name as the war file solved the problem.


This might be caused by issue in your code. In my case, for instance,

I had Mongo database pointing to my local(done this for testing and forgot to update it back) instead of the one on EC2 which is the same machine 
        where war file is deployed to. 

How did I figured it out? I had to compare with older version of the code which works fine.



Tomcat has different WAR deployment ways. Some work, some don't. Please try the following deployment methods :

  • Automatic: Copy-paste your WAR file into ${CATALINA_HOME}/webapps. A folder with the same name will appear if everything goes right.
  • Manager Application: Upload the WAR file
  • Manager Application: Locate the WAR file

In my case, using the Manager Application (local URL: http://localhost:8080/manager) worked. Whereas deploying using a copy-paste resulted in your error.


I got this error when deploying a war file to Tomcat. My project required Java 1.8, and it turned out only Java 1.7 was installed. It wasn't immediately obvious from any log file that I could find.


Remove the servlet-api.jar from build path and just add it on web-inf lib folder and then export the WAR file..it'll work...cheers..!!!


I had this problem, where it just would not deploy on Tomcat , then i removed all @webServlet Annotations from all my servlet code and it deployed successfully.


There is also change that Eclipse Project is somehow corrupted. Usually case like this Eclipse is added some duplicated .jars in your project and those .jars are usually same as Maven Dependency .jars.

If your project look like below example there is huge change that Maven Dependencies are duplicated and should be removed manually.


e.g. (Project Explorer View)
src/main/java
src/test/java
spring-boot-vaadin.jar
spring-aop.jar
Maven Dependencies
  spring-boot-vaadin.jar
  spring-aop.jar
etc...

...and this is cure :-)


Project/Properties/Java Build Path/Libraries

Just remove all REPO_M2/... paths and update project.


I got stuck and problem solved Don't use the path that is "Map Network Drive", but use the \server\folder structure instead


Check your WEB-INF/web.xml file for the servlet Mapping.


I got this error when there was no enough space in server. check logs and server spaces


I got out of memory error with when facing such phenomena:

Caused by: java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space

after freeing some memory, the problem is solved.


Might be super trivial but worth a check prior to waste some time.

At my case the mysql service was down.

When you have a java app including JPA / Hibernate it is checking the database connection on startup. Just found out by looking into the looks where it had an entity manager error.


I also faced this due to Tomcat version mismatching! According to the documentation, the default tomcat version of Grails 4.0.x is tomcat 8 but in the server that I was using had the tomcat version of 9.0.31!

in the build.gradle file I changed compile "org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-tomcat" to provided "org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-tomcat" and added/modified the cache plugin to compile "org.grails.plugins:cache", { exclude group: "org.codehaus.groovy", module: "groovy-all" } under dependencies block! [Cache plugin comes with groovy-all 2.1]

It worked like a charm! Strangely, this did not cause any problems when running the app with command grails run-app


In eclipse ... go to Servers view ... right click on the tomcat server -> Add or remove programs -> Remove all other projects. Now try to run the project. It should work.