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Debugging the dreaded "SEVERE: Error listenerStart" and "SEVERE: Error filterStart" tomcat error messages

March 18th, 2011 by
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Just a quick post that I hope might benefit others. If you have been developing web applications on tomcat for a while you have likely come the two error messages mentioned in the title.

SEVERE: Error listenerStart

Occurs when an exception is thrown in the contextInitialized method of a ServletContextListener

SEVERE: Error filterStart

Occurs when an exception is thrown in the init method of a Filter

Unfortunately by default, tomcat won't provide you with any details about the cause of the error. Infact it wont even tell you which filter or listener is failing. This can be big problem in applications of significant size that have many filters and listeners configured. Fortunately there is a solution. In your webapplication's WEB-INF/classes folder you can create a logging.properties file with the following contents

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

Now you will be presented with the stacktrace

Posted in: Java

30 Responses

  1. 03-04-2011 at 21:29 by Flashrunner
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    Thanks!
    It works!

  2. 19-04-2011 at 10:49 by Ali
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    Brilliant solution!

  3. 28-04-2011 at 12:16 by Kevin Keegan
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    You the man, top solution.

  4. 03-05-2011 at 08:50 by Racs
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    Thanks, it works!

  5. 21-05-2011 at 13:28 by Micha Roon
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    it just works. thanks a lot, it was driving me craizy this
    SEVERE: Error filterStart

  6. 07-06-2011 at 08:33 by Tseliso
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    Thanks, it works!

  7. 21-06-2011 at 17:50 by Alex Guerrieri
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    You saved me a lot of time with this little trick. Many thanks!

  8. 24-06-2011 at 23:00 by blog/shl@INTERDOSE » links for 2011-06-24
    |

    [...] Debugging the dreaded “SEVERE: Error listenerStart” and “SEVERE: Error filterStart” tomcat e... (tags: java) Related: MacOS Forge und git... [...]

  9. 10-08-2011 at 22:22 by Bijesh
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    Great help... Thanks alot

  10. 15-08-2011 at 20:23 by Niklas
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    Be sure to really call the file "logging.properties". I was trying to add those lines to an existing "log4j.properties" file which did not produce the desired logging output (tomcat 7.0.19).
    Once I called the file "logging.properties" it worked...

  11. 24-08-2011 at 23:35 by Numerouno
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    Thanks - it works

  12. 02-09-2011 at 08:21 by Amol
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    Thx a lot it works..... Great Help :)

  13. 08-09-2011 at 11:22 by Marcel
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    Hi,

    if you have this problem mit JBoss 4, then edit server/default/conf/jboss-log4j.xml and add this:

  14. 08-09-2011 at 11:23 by Marcel
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    <category name="org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase">
    <priority value="INFO"/>
    </category>

  15. 12-12-2011 at 00:54 by Pravin
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    Thanks a lot .....it worked!!

  16. 28-12-2011 at 08:18 by Roshan
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    Thanks a lot dudde, It's solved my problem.
    Thanks once again.

  17. 11-01-2012 at 07:43 by Manav
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    I did the steps. But still no stacktrace is printed on the console. Am I missing something ? Do I need to call logging.properties file explicitly ?

  18. 06-02-2012 at 17:05 by Gianluca
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    Thanks! This saved my day once more!

  19. 09-02-2012 at 10:00 by Monali
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    I had missed out on commons-pool-1.4.jar in my spring application.
    It works after I include this jar.

  20. 16-02-2012 at 18:30 by Steve
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    I had SEVERE Error listenerStart while starting tomcat on Mac OS X lion and the fix for me was to set

    export JAVA_OPTS=-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true

    before starting

  21. 03-03-2012 at 03:20 by Joselito
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    thanks!

  22. 23-03-2012 at 03:34 by Thiago
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    At Tomcat-7.0.x it only works if you set the configurations to conf/logging.properties

  23. 04-04-2012 at 18:34 by Kyle
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    I'm using tomcat 7.0.12 and I can't get this to work. I added those lines to logging.properties in the conf directory but I still just get the same error with no extra information. Is there something else I need to do?

  24. 05-04-2012 at 20:58 by Maya Buttreeks
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    Works perfectly! Thanks for the tip!

  25. 23-04-2012 at 00:32 by Jonathon
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    Well, Thiago, fancy seeing you making that point, since I came here for that same reason.

    And...we work for the same company ;)

  26. 09-06-2012 at 10:53 by Semika
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    Thank you so much. I can see full stack trance now. ;)

  27. 13-08-2012 at 08:46 by swetha
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    Thank You so so much.Your tip is really useful.

  28. 28-11-2012 at 13:25 by dlaro
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    Tomcat 7.0.30 provides such a standard logging configuration:

    ---
    org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].level = INFO
    org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].handlers = 2localhost.org.apache.juli.FileHandler

    org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].[/manager].level = INFO
    org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].[/manager].handlers = 3manager.org.apache.juli.FileHandler

    org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].[/host-manager].level = INFO
    org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].[/host-manager].handlers = 4host-manager.org.apache.juli.FileHandler

    ---
    This means that you simply have o look into the parallel produced log file, which starts like "localhost.*".

  29. 22-01-2013 at 12:39 by Srikanth
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    Thanks... it works

  30. 18-04-2013 at 13:10 by Arun Chaudhary
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    Great help. Thanx a lot. It saved a lot of time.

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