Exception deploying war in tomcat with version 4.0.0

[miguelabautista]

Tomcat throws an Exception when using new version

NOTE: If I use version 3.1.0 the app is deployed correctly

Exception:

SEVERE [main] org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployWAR Error deploying web application archive [E:\apache-tomcat-9.0.33\webapps\prueba.war]
java.lang.IllegalStateException: Error starting child

see logger file for full logger.

Environment Information

• Operating System: windows 11
• Grails Version: 5.1.2
• Plugin Version: 4.0.0
• JDK Version: java 8
• Tomcat Version: 9.0.56

Example Application

https://github.com/miguelabautista/database-migration-sample

[miguelabautista]

logger.txt

[davidkron]

We are experiencing the exact same error in our application and are therefore currently not upgrading to the newest version.
The problem only surfaces when deploying to an external Tomcat, run-app is not affected.

I did some debugging and I managed to track the difference (with and without database-migration plugin) of the execution to the following lines:
https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/blob/v5.3.15/spring-web/src/main/java/org/springframework/web/SpringServletContainerInitializer.java#L172-L174

Without database-migration plugin, the following initializers are present:

• org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.jersey.JerseyAutoConfiguration.JerseyWebApplicationInitializer
• ApplicationLoader (this class seems to be automatically generated by Grails)

If the database-migration plugin is included, the initializers are the following:

• org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.jersey.JerseyAutoConfiguration.JerseyWebApplicationInitializer
• org.springframework.boot.cli.app.SpringApplicationWebApplicationInitializer
• ApplicationLoader

So the culprit seems to be SpringApplicationWebApplicationInitializer, which is also where the NullPointerException is thrown. This class belongs to the project spring-boot-cli and is included through the following dependency chain of the database-migration plugin:

./gradlew dependencyInsight --dependency spring-boot-cli
...
org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-cli:2.6.2
\--- org.grails:grails-shell:5.1.2
     \--- org.grails.plugins:database-migration:4.0.0 (requested org.grails:grails-shell)
          \--- compileClasspath

This also includes grails-shell, which shouldn't belong in an application artifact.

I think this might be related to this issue which I opened:
grails/grails-core#12183

[rilisema]

Can someone tell me which settings work for grails 5.1.2? I am experiencing this issue also. Version 4.0.1-SNAPSHOT is not working, neither does 4.0.0. When I try to go back to version 3.0.4 I get another error (java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/springframework/boot/liquibase/CommonsLoggingLiquibaseLogger).

[miguelabautista]

@davidkron Please test with the new version (4.1.0) I have the same error.

in my case if I do this it works:

implementation('org.grails.plugins:database-migration:4.1.0') {
exclude module: 'spring-boot-cli'
}