others-how to solve tomcat 404 problem when using docker to start tomcat?

Aug 10, 2023

1. Purpose

In this post, I will show you how to solve the following problem when using docker to start tomcat:

# HTTP Status 404 – Not found

**Type** Status Report

**Description** The origin server did not find a current representation for the target resource or is not willing to disclose that one exists.

the docker command:

docker run --name tomcat -p 8080:8080 -d tomcat

2. Solution

how to solve this problem? we can just go into the docker container, and see what’s inside the webapps as follows:

[root@local tomcat]# docker ps |grep tomcat
2e010bb7c25e   tomcat                                                  "/entrypoint.sh cata…"   2 minutes ago   Up 2 minutes            0.0.0.0:8686->8080/tcp, :::8686->8080/tcp                                              tomcat
[root@local tomcat]# docker exec -it tomcat /bin/bash
root@2e010bb7c25e:/usr/local/tomcat# ls -l webapps
total 0

You can see that there is nothing inside the webapps, that’s the reason you got 404 , because there are no webapps to serve your request. Then we should do as follows(Still inside the tomcat container):

root@2e010bb7c25e:/usr/local/tomcat# ls -l
total 128
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root  4096 Aug  8 21:18 bin
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 20123 Jul  6 13:45 BUILDING.txt
drwxr-xr-x. 1 root root    30 Aug 10 07:21 conf
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  6210 Jul  6 13:45 CONTRIBUTING.md
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root  4096 Aug  8 21:17 lib
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 60393 Jul  6 13:45 LICENSE
drwxrwxrwt. 1 root root    80 Aug 10 07:21 logs
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root   186 Aug  8 21:18 native-jni-lib
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  2333 Jul  6 13:45 NOTICE
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  3398 Jul  6 13:45 README.md
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root  6776 Jul  6 13:45 RELEASE-NOTES
-rw-r--r--. 1 root root 16076 Jul  6 13:45 RUNNING.txt
drwxrwxrwt. 2 root root    38 Aug  8 21:17 temp
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root    10 Aug  8 21:17 webapps
drwxr-xr-x. 7 root root   105 Jul  6 13:45 webapps.dist
drwxrwxrwt. 2 root root    10 Jul  6 13:45 work
root@2e010bb7c25e:/usr/local/tomcat# mv webapps webapps2
root@2e010bb7c25e:/usr/local/tomcat# mv webapps.dist webapps
root@2e010bb7c25e:/usr/local/tomcat# exit
exit
[root@local tomcat]# docker stop tomcat
tomcat
[root@local tomcat]# docker start tomcat
tomcat

You can see that we have done this jobs to make it work:

rename the old webapps directory to webapps2, which will not be used to serve your request
rename the webapps.dist to webapps, then it will be used to serve your request
exit the tomcat docker container
restart the tomcat docker container

Now visit http://x.x.x.x:8080 again, got this:

[root@local tomcat]# curl -v http://localhost:8080/
* About to connect() to localhost port 8080 (#0)
*   Trying ::1...
* Connected to localhost (::1) port 8080 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.29.0
> Host: localhost:8080
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Accept-Ranges: bytes
< Content-Type: text/html
< Content-Length: 2626

You can see that it works!

Here is the summary, the problem’s reason is that:

It turns out that all default tomcat apps have been removed from the webapps directory for all tomcat images starting with Tomcat version 7. All apps have been moved to /usr/local/tomcat/webapps.dist directory so that they are not launched by default. You can read about it here.

3. Summary

In this post, I demonstrated how to solve the 404 error when using docker to start tomcat container. That’s it, thanks for your reading.