How can I find the error when Tomcat fails to start my Spring/Hibernate web application?

Question

I have a Spring/Hibernate application which I have converted into a web application in order to provide RESTful web services (using Jersey). I am trying to deploy the web application onto Tomcat 6.0.20 and I get only a cryptic error message in the log file:

Jul 8, 2009 2:25:22 PM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext start
SEVERE: Error listenerStart
Jul 8, 2009 2:25:22 PM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext start
SEVERE: Context [/lmrest] startup failed due to previous errors

I have set my logging level to debug but there are no suspicious messages which show what went awry, other than this one, which looks pretty innocuous to me:

1360 [http-8080-1] INFO  org.hibernate.cfg.search.HibernateSearchEventListenerRegister  - Unable to find org.hibernate.search.event.FullTextIndexEventListener on the classpath. Hibernate Search is not enabled.

I am using the latest versions of Spring and Hibernate. I am using a ContextLoaderListener in my web.xml. Could this be the listener that is failing to start? I assume it is running at least partially since I can see many Hibernate configuration log messages scroll past before the failure of the start of the web app. My main trouble is I can't see any error messages indicating what has failed to start the listener it's complaining about.

The web.xml I'm using looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app version="2.5" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee
                   http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"&gt;

    <!-- listener to pull in the Spring application context -->
    <listener>
        <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
    </listener>
    <context-param>
        <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
        <param-value>classpath:appContext.xml</param-value>
    </context-param>

    <!-- Jersey servlet container to intercept all URIs -->
    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>JerseyContainer</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>com.sun.jersey.spi.container.servlet.ServletContainer</servlet-class>
        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>
    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>JerseyContainer</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>
</web-app>

If anyone can give me some ideas as to where to look for my error I'll really appreciate it, as I'm stumped. Thanks in advance!

--James

Answer 1

Are there any errors further up in the log (at an earlier point in time)? That's not much to go off of (though I wouldn't be surprised if that's it).

Answer 2

Check your log4j.properties or log4j.xml and make sure your logging level is set to DEBUG

Answer 3

Apache can't find class org.hibernate.cfg.search.HibernateSearchEventListenerRegister. Are you sure that all classes needed to start hibernate are loaded in classpath? Hibernate is divided into many .jar package, I suggest you to check dependencies beetween files .jar

Answer 4

Please do the following:

• remove all log4j related artifacts from your war file - includes log4j.jar/properties/xml;
• include log4j.jar in common/lib or lib ( depending on your Tomcat version );
• add a log4j.properties file in common/classes ( not sure on Tomcat 6 ).

This config should make sure that all log4j output is properly directed. Switch to debug if needed, but it should not be:

log4j.rootLogger=info, R 

log4j.appender.R=org.apache.log4j.RollingFileAppender 
log4j.appender.R.File=${catalina.home}/logs/catalina.out 
log4j.appender.R.MaxFileSize=10MB 
log4j.appender.R.MaxBackupIndex=10 
log4j.appender.R.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout 
log4j.appender.R.layout.ConversionPattern=%d %p %t %c - %m%n

Answer 5

Here is a similar discussion at the SprinSource forums. Since the applicationContext.xml works with a standard JAR, this is most probably a classpath problem. Double check the WEB-INF/lib folder and make sure there aren't conflicting jars in Tomcat's shared folder.