Ant, Tomcat Build Error: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/tomcat/util/buf/B2CConverter

Question

Tomcat Version: 7.0.20

I am attempting to work my way through the following Spring MVC tutorial: http://static.springsource.org/docs/Spring-MVC-step-by-step/part1.html

In this tutorial, an ant build script is setup to deploy to tomcat using the manager. However, I run into some problems when I try to run any of the tomcat tasks.

First off, in the tutorial, they still use org.apache.catalina.ant.InstallTask which is deprecated, so I changed to org.apache.catalina.ant.DeployTask.

Now the problem is that when trying to run the Tomcat tasks I get:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/tomcat/util/buf/B2CConverter
    at org.apache.catalina.util.Base64.encode(Base64.java:177)
    at org.apache.catalina.ant.AbstractCatalinaTask.execute(AbstractCatalinaTask.java:204)
    at org.apache.catalina.ant.AbstractCatalinaTask.execute(AbstractCatalinaTask.java:150)
    at org.apache.catalina.ant.ReloadTask.execute(ReloadTask.java:45)
    at org.apache.tools.ant.UnknownElement.execute(UnknownElement.java:291)
    at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
    at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
    at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
    at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
    at org.apache.tools.ant.dispatch.DispatchUtils.execute(DispatchUtils.java:106)
    at org.apache.tools.ant.Task.perform(Task.java:348)
    at org.apache.tools.ant.Target.execute(Target.java:390)
    at org.apache.tools.ant.Target.performTasks(Target.java:411)
    at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeSortedTargets(Project.java:1399)
    at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeTarget(Project.java:1368)
    at org.apache.tools.ant.helper.DefaultExecutor.executeTargets(DefaultExecutor.java:41)
    at org.apache.tools.ant.Project.executeTargets(Project.java:1251)
    at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.runBuild(Main.java:809)
    at org.apache.tools.ant.Main.startAnt(Main.java:217)
    at org.apache.tools.ant.launch.Launcher.run(Launcher.java:280)
    at org.apache.tools.ant.launch.Launcher.main(Launcher.java:109)
 Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.tomcat.util.buf.B2CConverter
    at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:202)
    at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
    at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:306)
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:247)
    ... 21 more

So I Googled around a bit and found some information stating that tomcat-utils.jar should be in the class path so I added that into the fileset with the catalina-ant.jar but apparently the org.apache.tomcat.util.buf.B2CConverter class is not in there.

So next I started probing the jars with jar -tf to find out if any contained the class. I found out that tomcat-coyote.jar had the class. Even with including this in the fileset, the problem is not resolved.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

I got this working by changing the classpath to

<path id="catalina-ant-classpath">
    <!-- We need the Catalina jars for Tomcat -->
    <!--  * for other app servers - check the docs --> 
    <fileset dir="${appserver.lib}">
        <include name="catalina-ant.jar"/>
        <include name="tomcat-coyote.jar"/>
        <include name="tomcat-util.jar"/>
    </fileset>
    <fileset dir="${appserver.home}/bin">
                <include name="tomcat-juli.jar"/>
    </fileset>
</path>

Answer 2

Like Jason, I tried Aidan's answer and it did not work. With TomCat 7 the manager interface has changed a little. Instead of using /manager/list in the URL you have to use /manager/text/list. So I changed the list task in build.xml to the following:

<target name="list" description="List Tomcat applications">
    <list url="${tomcat.manager.url}/text"
             username="${tomcat.manager.username}"
             password="${tomcat.manager.password}"/>
</target>

I also had to add the "manager-script" role to my admin user so that it would have the proper privileges for this operation:

  <role rolename="manager-gui"/>
  <role rolename="manager-script"/>
  <user username="admin" password="admin" roles="manager-gui,manager-script"/>

Answer 3

I found the same error when following the same tutorial. I had to make 3 changes so that the targets run correctly.

First, change the build.xml "list" target to add the /text above mentioned:

<target name="list" description="List Tomcat applications">
    <list url="${tomcat.manager.url}/text"
          username="${tomcat.manager.username}"
          password="${tomcat.manager.password}"/>
</target>

Second, change the catalina ant classpath:

<path id="catalina-ant-classpath">
    <fileset dir="${appserver.home}/lib">
        <include name="catalina-ant.jar"/>
        <include name="tomcat-coyote.jar"/>
        <include name="tomcat-util.jar"/>
    </fileset>
    <fileset dir="${appserver.home}/bin">
        <include name="tomcat-juli.jar"/>
    </fileset>
</path>

And finally, add this to the tomcat-users.xml file:

<role rolename="manager-script"/>
  <user username="tomcat" password="s3cret" roles="manager-gui,tomcat,manager-script"/>

And then it worked for me =)