What to Do When You Get “Error listerStart” with Tomcat

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I’m sure many people other than me have banged their head in the wall trying to figure out an error like this:

SEVERE: Error listenerStart 
26-May-2012 13:44:27 org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext startInternal 
SEVERE: Context [] startup failed due to previous errors

That basically means that tomcat failed to start the webapp because there was an error with some listener, quite often Spring context listener. The really annoying part is that it doesn’t actually show you what went wrong. There’s actually pretty simple way to get tomcat to log the actual error. You just need to create a logging.properties in WEB-INF/classes of the failing webapp and add following lines to it:

org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].level = INFO
org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].handlers = java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler

Then just reload the webapp to see the error in tomcat console log. I hope this tip saves you a lot of hasle from trying to figure out the root cause of the problem.

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