CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javatomcatquartz-scheduler
Mike O
Mike O

Reputation: 51

How to start and stop Tomcat cleanly from Java and why my way doesn't work repeatably?

I am writing a Quartz application that runs on Windows and calls Lucene and Solr to run indexing jobs. It runs a sequence of jobs, and each job consists of these steps:

  1. Make sure Tomcat is stopped (Solr running under Tomcat prevents index dir from being deleted or copied)
  2. Delete old index directory if necessary
  3. Start Tomcat
  4. Make sure Tomcat and Solr app are running
  5. Run the indexing job
  6. Stop Tomcat
  7. Make sure Tomcat is stopped
  8. Copy index directory to an archive

I decided to have the code that starts and stops Tomcat set the system properties that are set in Startup.bat, Shutdown.bat and Catalina.bat, and just call Bootstrap.main with "start" and "stop" parameters. This worked for one iteration, but not when I tried a Quartz run in which I set up two iterations.

When my code shut down Tomcat at the end of the first iteration, all of the usual messages were displayed, including

INFO: Stopping ProtocolHandler ["http-bio-5918"]

(I am using port 5918) but when it tried to start Tomcat at the beginning of the second iteration, it got thes errors:

SEVERE: Failed to initialize end point associated with ProtocolHandler ["http-bio-5918"]
java.net.BindException: Address already in use: JVM_Bind <null>:5918

and

SEVERE: Failed to initialize connector [Connector[HTTP/1.1-5918]]
org.apache.catalina.LifecycleException: Failed to initialize component [Connector[HTTP/1.1-5918]]

I ran netstat -an in a command prompt window, and it confirmed that port 5918 was in use. There's nothing special about the code I am using to check if Tomcat is running. I've seen in various places on the internet.

public boolean isTomcatRunning(String url) {
  boolean isRunning = false;

  try {
    new URL(url).openConnection().connect();
    isRunning = true;
  } catch (IOException e) {
    isRunning = false;
  }
  return isRunning;
}

but it apparently tells me that Tomcat is not running when it is.

As I said, I am starting and stopping Tomcat by calling Bootstrap.main(new String[]{"start"}) and Bootstrap.main(new String[]{"stop"}). The only thing peculiar about that is that is that when I simply call Bootstrap.main(new String[]{"start"}), it doesn't seem to return (I haven't waited long enough yet to see if it is hanging or just taking a long time), so I have been running it inside a thread.

Maybe that is causing the problem, as it looks like Catalina.bat isn't doing anything special and it returns from startup just fine. I wonder if there is an additional setup I need to do to enable it to run startup in the main thread without hanging.

In any case, this is what I am puzzled about with starting and stopping Tomcat from within my Quartz application, and I would appreciate any help and suggestions you can offer.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 722

Answers (1)

Bruno Grieder
Bruno Grieder

Reputation: 29814

I strongly suggest that you wrap your Tomcat instance with a wrapper that controls the lifecycle of your Tomcat instance. Such wrapper is the Java Service Wrapper. An older version (3.2.3 I believe) is "free" and works fine with newer Tomcat instances.

Your controlling application then "talks" to the wrapper to start/stop the Tomcat application. There are multiple benefits with this approach. One of them is that you are not subject to your Tomcat application hanging and the port you are testing not replying anymore.

Upvotes: 1

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