Spring JavaConfig and Tomcat 8

Question

I have a Spring 4 web application (webapp-module.war) working and running locally in eclipse using Java 8, tomcat 8 and JavaConfig (no web.xml):

But when I deploy to tomcat 8 (same version I am using locally in eclipse) on a remote Ubuntu server I get:

I verified host and port which are correct. There is no error in the log (/var/lib/tomcat8/logs/catalina.out)

Jun 21, 2016 10:32:44 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig undeploy
INFO: Undeploying context [/webapp-module]
Jun 21, 2016 10:32:44 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig deployWAR
INFO: Deploying web application archive /var/lib/tomcat8/webapps/webapp-module.war
Jun 21, 2016 10:32:46 PM org.apache.jasper.servlet.TldScanner scanJars
INFO: At least one JAR was scanned for TLDs yet contained no TLDs. Enable debug logging for this logger for a complete list of JARs that were scanned but no TLDs were found in them. Skipping unneeded JARs during scanning can improve startup time and JSP compilation time.
Jun 21, 2016 10:32:46 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig deployWAR
INFO: Deployment of web application archive /var/lib/tomcat8/webapps/webapp-module.war has finished in 1,870 ms
root@vmi63860:/var/lib/tomcat8/logs# 

The access log contains:

root@vmi63860:/var/log/tomcat8# cat localhost_access_log.2016-06-22.txt 
xx.xxx.xxx.xx - - [22/Jun/2016:22:36:00 +0200] "GET /webapp-module/ HTTP/1.1" 404 1040
xx.xxx.xxx.xx - - [22/Jun/2016:22:36:00 +0200] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 1034
xx.xxx.xxx.xx - - [22/Jun/2016:22:36:50 +0200] "GET /webapp-module/hello HTTP/1.1" 404 1050

Where xx.xxx.xxx.xx is the IP of my local machine from where I try to access the web app in my browser.

I took a look at: Spring Java Config: Tomcat deploy without web.xml but it does not really provide a solution.

Details on my project below:

Sources

Config.java

@Configuration // Marks this class as configuration
// Specifies which package to scan
@ComponentScan("com.samples")
// Enables Spring's annotations
@EnableWebMvc
public class Config {

  @Bean
  public UrlBasedViewResolver setupViewResolver() {
    UrlBasedViewResolver resolver = new UrlBasedViewResolver();
    resolver.setPrefix("/WEB-INF/jsp/");
    resolver.setSuffix(".jsp");
    resolver.setViewClass(JstlView.class);
    return resolver;
  }

}

WebInitializer.java

public class WebInitializer implements WebApplicationInitializer {

  @Override
  public void onStartup(ServletContext servletContext) throws ServletException {

    AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext ctx = new AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext();
    ctx.register(Config.class);
    ctx.setServletContext(servletContext);

    Dynamic servlet = servletContext.addServlet("dispatcher", new DispatcherServlet(ctx));
    servlet.addMapping("/");
    servlet.setLoadOnStartup(1);

  }

}

HelloController.java

@Controller
public class HelloController {

  @RequestMapping("/")
  public String home() {
    return "index";
  }

  @RequestMapping("/hello")
  public String showhello(ModelMap model) {
    model.addAttribute("message", "Hello Spring MVC Framework!");
    return "hello";
  }

}

Answer 1

Sorry previously I was too hasty

It seems that spring context is not at all loaded.

I guess the problem is in this piece of code:

public class WebInitializer implements WebApplicationInitializer {

  @Override
  public void onStartup(ServletContext servletContext) throws ServletException {

    AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext ctx = new AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext();
    ctx.register(Config.class);
    ctx.setServletContext(servletContext);

    Dynamic servlet = servletContext.addServlet("dispatcher", new DispatcherServlet(ctx));
    servlet.addMapping("/");
    servlet.setLoadOnStartup(1);

  }

}

You used ctx.register(Config.class);

In any case I always used this kind of initialization:

public class AppInitializer implements WebApplicationInitializer {

    @Override
    public void onStartup(ServletContext servletContext) throws ServletException {
        // Create the 'root' Spring application context
        AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext rootContext = new AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext();
        rootContext.scan("com.spring");
        rootContext.setConfigLocations(new String[]{"com.spring.config.WebAppContextConfig", "com.spring.config.AppConfig"});
        // Manages the lifecycle of the root application context
        servletContext.addListener(new ContextLoaderListener(rootContext));

        // Declare dispatcher servlet. Handles requests into the application
        ServletRegistration.Dynamic dispatcher = servletContext.addServlet("dispatcher",
                new DispatcherServlet(rootContext));
        dispatcher.setLoadOnStartup(1);
        dispatcher.addMapping("/");

    }

}

As you can see I used rootContext.setConfigLocations in order to specify where to find the spring configuration classes

In any case Here you can find a working sample I successfully deployed it on tomcat 8.0.39 and 8.5.4

Hope it's useful

Angelo