Debugging Tomcat SEVERE: Error filterStart or listenerStart

Posted by Erik Pragt on May 21, 2012 in Java | 0 comments

Today, we spent quite some time debugging our Grails application to find out why in ‘grails run-app’, the application worked fine, however, when running the application in Tomcat (6.0.35), an error popped up. The error not quite helpful indeed: SEVERE: Error filterStart.

To debug this, after some Googling, which pointed us into the wrong direction, I downloaded the Tomcat source and found the issue. All you have to do is change the logging.properties file in your TOMCAT_HOME/conf directory, and add the following:

org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.[Catalina].level = ALL
org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.[Catalina].handlers = java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler

This showed us the stacktrace, and pointed us in the direction of Spring Security Core (org.springframework.beans.factory.NoSuchBeanDefinitionException: No bean named ‘springSecurityFilterChain’ is defined), which will hopefully be a blog for tomorrow