Grails war without tomcat plugin

Question

When I build a grails 2.1.0 app with the tomcat 2.2.0 I get the following error on startup when I deploy on Tomcat 7:

INFO: validateJarFile(/app/app/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/lib/tomcat-embed-core-7.0.27.jar) - jar not loaded. See Servlet Spec 2.3, section 9.7.2. Offending class: javax/servlet/Servlet.class Dec 1, 2012 4:01:01 PM org.apache.catalina.core.NamingContextListener lifecycleEvent SEVERE: Creation of the naming context failed: javax.naming.NamingException: Context is read only

and

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/tomcat/PeriodicEventListener at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method) at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:634) at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:142) at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.findClassInternal(WebappClassLoader.java:2818) at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.findClass(WebappClassLoader.java:1159) at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.loadClass(WebappClassLoader.java:1647) at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.loadClass(WebappClassLoader.java:1526) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapper.loadServlet(StandardWrapper.java:1128) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapper.load(StandardWrapper.java:1026)

If I delete the tomcat-* jar files in the exploded war the app starts without a problem, or if I remove the tomcat plugin the app starts without a problem. Ideally I would like to build the app without the plugin but have for development purposes. Is this possible?

Burt Beckwith Burt Beckwith · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-04T05:12:14

For starters, use the version of the Tomcat plugin that corresponds to the version of Grails you're using. The real problem though is that the plugin should only be available in development for the run-app and run-war scripts, but shouldn't end up in the WAR file created by the war script. If you have the plugin in application.properties, remove it (along with any other plugins that are there). This puts the plugin in compile scope and will lead to it being in the WAR file.

The correct way to use the plugin is to add a build scope dependency in the plugins section of BuildConfig.groovy:

plugins {
   runtime ":hibernate:$grailsVersion"
   build ":tomcat:$grailsVersion"
}

Grails war without tomcat plugin

1 Answers