Tomcat not starting : tomcat.service: Control process exited, code=exited status=1

Question

This is the error message i am facing

I had tomcat8 already installed. i removed that and then i tried installing tomcat8 again but facing this issue and i am not able to install tomcat again. List of Steps i followed before Installing -

1. sudo apt-get remove tomcat8
2. sudo apt-get remove --auto-remove tomcat8
3. sudo apt-get purge tomcat8
4. sudo apt-get purge --auto-remove tomcat8

Now i have installed new tomcat8 from here - https://websiteforstudents.com/setup-apache-tomcat-8-8-5-on-ubuntu-16-04-18-04-lts/

and getting error - image attached above

Answer 1

First of all, if you are using Debian or Ubuntu, using the tomcat8/tomcat9 packages (cf. packages.ubuntu.com) is the easiest way to run a Tomcat server.

In your case the tomcat.service file lacks a PIDFile option, which helps determining in a reliable way that Tomcat is running. Therefore I would modify your tomcat.service script to contain:

[Service]
# ...
# The rest of the options
PIDFile="/run/tomcat.pid"
Environment="CATALINA_PID=/run/tomcat.pid"

Before starting the service make sure that your Tomcat is not running (killall java or something more subtle) and remember to reload the SystemD daemon:

systemctl daemon-reload

Edit: After the modification the tomcat.service file should look like this:

[Unit]
Description=Tomcat servlet container
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=forking
User=tomcat
Group=tomcat
Environment="JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/default-java"
Environment="JAVA_OPTS=-Djava.security.egd=file:///dev/urandom"
Environment="CATALINA_HOME=/opt/tomcat"
Environment="CATALINA_PID=/run/tomcat.pid"
Environment="CATALINA_OPTS=-Xms512M -Xmx1024M -server -XX:+UseParallelGC"

PIDFile="/run/tomcat.pid"

ExecStart=/opt/tomcat/bin/startup.sh
ExecStop=/opt/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Answer 2

In my case using RHEL 8 system and i did below steps to fix the issue, then able to start tomcat service using systemctl.

Step 1: Validate any SELinux context related error in the audit search.

ausearch -m avc -ts recent

error reported unable to start service using systemctl due to SELinux context.

Step 2: Change SELinux SELinux contex for tomcat related files and directories

ls -lZ /etc/systemd/system/tomcat.service
chcon system_u:object_r:systemd_unit_file_t:s0 /etc/systemd/system/tomcat.service
chcon -Rv system_u:object_r:etc_runtime_t:s0 /opt/CAE/
semanage fcontext -a -t etc_runtime_t /opt/tomcat/bin/catalina.sh
semanage fcontext -a -t etc_runtime_t /opt/CAE/

Step 3: Define the systemctl file with below information's

$ sudo cat /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/tomcat.service
[Unit]
Description=tomcat service
After=syslog.target network.target

[Service]
Type=forking
User=tomcat
Group=tomcat


Environment="JAVA_HOME=/opt/CAE/CAESECURE_CMVQ1Z02_AS/java"
Environment="CATALINA_BASE=/opt/CAE/CAESECURE_CMVQ1Z02_AS/tomcat"
Environment="CATALINA_HOME=/opt/CAE/CAESECURE_CMVQ1Z02_AS/tomcat"
Environment="CATALINA_PID=/opt/tomcat/bin/tomcat.pid"
PIDFile="/opt/tomcat/bin/tomcat.pid"

ExecStart=/opt/tomcat/bin/catalina.sh start
ExecStop=/opt/tomcat/bin/catalina.sh stop

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Step 4: Now start the service using systemctl

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl start tomcat.service
systemctl restart tomcat.service

Validation: Now no SELinux error has been reported and able to start the service

ausearch -m avc -ts recent
systemctl status tomcat.service

no error reported