Tomcat + Spring Boot + 'javax.websocket.server.ServerContainer' not found

Question

I am trying to deploy a Spring Boot (2.0.5) web application (war) with web sockets to a Tomcat 8.5.37 server, it previously worked with Tomcat 7. My web socket configuration is throwing the exception and preventing the application from starting. Am I missing some type of configuration in Spring or Tomcat? Something that is no longer available since I upgraded Tomcat?

I am able to run locally (through eclipse and eclipse's Tomcat v8.5), but when I try to deploy to our Tomcat server on our qa enviroment I get the following:

org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'createWebSocketContainer' defined in class path resource [com/soft/core/app/configuration/WebSocketConfiguration.class]: Invocation of init method failed; nested exception is java.lang.IllegalStateException: Attribute 'javax.websocket.server.ServerContainer' not found in ServletContext
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.initializeBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:1699)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.doCreateBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:573)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.createBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:495)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory.lambda$doGetBean$0(AbstractBeanFactory.java:317)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultSingletonBeanRegistry.getSingleton(DefaultSingletonBeanRegistry.java:222)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory.doGetBean(AbstractBeanFactory.java:315)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory.getBean(AbstractBeanFactory.java:199)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory.preInstantiateSingletons(DefaultListableBeanFactory.java:740)
    at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.finishBeanFactoryInitialization(AbstractApplicationContext.java:869)
    at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.refresh(AbstractApplicationContext.java:550)
    at org.springframework.boot.web.servlet.context.ServletWebServerApplicationContext.refresh(ServletWebServerApplicationContext.java:140)
    at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.refresh(SpringApplication.java:780)
    at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.refreshContext(SpringApplication.java:412)
    at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.run(SpringApplication.java:333)
    at org.springframework.boot.web.servlet.support.SpringBootServletInitializer.run(SpringBootServletInitializer.java:157)
    at org.springframework.boot.web.servlet.support.SpringBootServletInitializer.createRootApplicationContext(SpringBootServletInitializer.java:137)
    at org.springframework.boot.web.servlet.support.SpringBootServletInitializer.onStartup(SpringBootServletInitializer.java:91)
    at org.springframework.web.SpringServletContainerInitializer.onStartup(SpringServletContainerInitializer.java:172)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.startInternal(StandardContext.java:5267)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.start(LifecycleBase.java:150)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChildInternal(ContainerBase.java:754)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChild(ContainerBase.java:730)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost.addChild(StandardHost.java:734)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployWAR(HostConfig.java:985)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig$DeployWar.run(HostConfig.java:1857)
    at java.util.concurrent.Executors$RunnableAdapter.call(Unknown Source)
    at java.util.concurrent.FutureTask.run(Unknown Source)
    at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor.runWorker(Unknown Source)
    at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(Unknown Source)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)
Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Attribute 'javax.websocket.server.ServerContainer' not found in ServletContext

I was able to isolate to cause to this bean, if I remove this bean the app starts up:

@Configuration
@EnableWebSocketMessageBroker
public class WebSocketConfiguration implements WebSocketMessageBrokerConfigurer{
...
...
    @Bean
    public ServletServerContainerFactoryBean createWebSocketContainer() {
        ServletServerContainerFactoryBean container = new ServletServerContainerFactoryBean();
        container.setMaxTextMessageBufferSize(1024 * 1024); // 1 MB
        return container;
    }
}

This is my Spring-BOM.xml

<parent>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
    <version>2.0.5.RELEASE</version>
</parent>

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-jdbc</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.security</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-security-ldap</artifactId>
    </dependency>

    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-devtools</artifactId>
        <optional>true</optional>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-configuration-processor</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-websocket</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.security</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-security-messaging</artifactId>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

This is my pom.xml

   <packaging>war</packaging>
   ...
   <dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.apache.logging.log4j</groupId>
        <artifactId>log4j-api</artifactId>
        </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.apache.logging.log4j</groupId>
        <artifactId>log4j-core</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.mybatis</groupId>
        <artifactId>mybatis</artifactId>
        <version>3.2.8</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.mybatis</groupId>
        <artifactId>mybatis-spring</artifactId>
        <version>1.2.2</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>net.sourceforge.jtds</groupId>
        <artifactId>jtds</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.neo4j</groupId>
        <artifactId>neo4j-cypher-compiler-2.1</artifactId>
        <version>2.1.5</version>
    </dependency>
    <!-- jsoup HTML parser library @ https://jsoup.org/ -->
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.jsoup</groupId>
        <artifactId>jsoup</artifactId>
        <version>1.11.2</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype</groupId>
        <artifactId>jackson-datatype-jsr310</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>commons-net</groupId>
        <artifactId>commons-net</artifactId>
        <version>3.3</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>io.jsonwebtoken</groupId>
        <artifactId>jjwt</artifactId>
        <version>0.6.0</version>
    </dependency>              
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.assertj</groupId>
        <artifactId>assertj-core</artifactId>
        <version>3.8.0</version>
        <scope>test</scope>
    </dependency>        
</dependencies>

Answer 1

Had same issue for Tomcat 9.0.20 and Tomcat 9.0.21 with SpringBoot 2.1.1 to SpringBoot 2.1.6. Found some discussion here: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/issues/15746

They seems found problem with some kind tomcat version. Anyway.

What helped me was to add web.xml to catalog WEB-INF and paste following snippet:

<absolute-ordering>
    <name>spring_web</name>
</absolute-ordering>

Spring documentation: WebSocket and Spring

Answer 2

After many years, we were finally able to resolve this issue by updating to the latest minor version of Apache Tomcat 8 (8.5.78).

This is an alternative option to my previous answer of downgrading to an unstable Apache Tomcat 8 version.