SEVERE: Error listenerStart - debugging Tomcat applications

How to debug the dreaded ‘Error listenerStart’ error message

Heads up: this post is more than a year old, so some details may be out of date.

When starting up Tomcat I’m sure at one point in time you’ve encountered a ‘SEVERE: Error listenerStart’ message. This is caused by an application you have deployed. But what’s the exact cause of this error?

Create logging.propertiesto WEB-INF/classes/ with the following content:

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

Now restart Tomcat and you should see a stacktrace about what went wrong in catalina.out.