Andy Chase

Ahh, there's nothing I love more than killing a Saturday afternoon trying to figure out why something that usually "Just Works" doesn't.

In this case, I'm installing Tomcat on a new Windows laptop that needs to go to Europe on Monday.

Always eager to reduce cruft whenever possible, I unchecked the "Install example applications" box in the Windows installer. This lead to an exception when I would attempt to start Tomcat:

Catalina.stop: LifecycleException: Coyote connector has not been started

(New thing learned about Tomcat today: using "catalina.bat debug" is your friend.)

After some creative Googling, I finally came across a bug report from a slightly older version of Tomcat:

DO NOT REPLY [Bug 13967] New: - installing without example webapps prevents starting Tomcat

The workaround? You can either comment out some lines in server.xml, or reinstall Tomcat with example apps.