Tomcat 7.0.73 doesn't work with java 9

Question

Unable to start tomcat based app with java 9 because of default "java.endorsed.dirs" option in catalina.sh.

-Djava.endorsed.dirs=/usr/local/share/tomcat/endorsed is not supported. Endorsed standards and standalone APIs in modular form will be supported via the concept of upgradeable modules.  Error: Could not create the Java Virtual Machine.  Error: A fatal exception has occurred. Program will exit. 

Is there a work around for this?

Answer 1

You'll have to hack the script bin/catalina.sh to get this to work.

There are a bunch of lines like this in bin/catalina.sh:

  exec "$_RUNJDB" "$LOGGING_CONFIG" $LOGGING_MANAGER $JAVA_OPTS $CATALINA_OPTS \     -Djava.endorsed.dirs="$JAVA_ENDORSED_DIRS" -classpath "$CLASSPATH" \     ... 

Just remove the second of those lines (the one with -Djava.endorsed.dirs) in each case and you should be back in business.

I'm looking at improving those scripts so that -Djava.endorsed.dirs is not provided to the JVM when the value is empty (which should be the case if you are using Java 9).

UPDATE 2017-11-06

Looks like r1810284 should fix the endorsed.dirs problem. Expect this fix to be included in Tomcat 7.0.83 (or whatever the next 7.0.x version passes voting).

UPDATE 2018-03-07

The first official release of Apache tomcat 7.0.x that includes this fix is Apache Tomcat 7.0.84, voted stable on 2018-01-24.

Answer 2

The above issue was fixed with the later releases of Eclipse but Unfortunately, it appeared again with the release of Java 10. Here is my research : Initially, I installed Java 10 and Eclipse Oxygen 3 which gave me the same error you mentioned in your question. But, at the moment I installed Java 9 and pointed my Apache tomcat runtime server to it, the error was gone.