Notice! This post is more than a year old. It may be outdated.
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.properties
to 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
.