Spring Boot war file works with embedded but not with standalone Tomcat

Question

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:

• spring boot war without tomcat embedded
• Deploying a WAR in tomcat

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.

Answer 1

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.