Getting NoSuchMethodError:javax.servlet.ServletContext.getVirtualServerName()

Question

I am facing an issue during deployment of a service in Tomcat 8. Getting following error:

Caused by: java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: javax.servlet.ServletContext.getVirtualServerName()Ljava/lang/String; at org.apache.tomcat.websocket.server.WsServerContainer.(WsServerContainer.java:149) at org.apache.tomcat.websocket.server.WsSci.init(WsSci.java:131) at org.apache.tomcat.websocket.server.WsSci.onStartup(WsSci.java:47) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.startInternal(StandardContext.java:5244) at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.start(LifecycleBase.java:150)... 10 more

Method getVirtualServerName was introduced in Servlet 3.1 and after extracting MANIFEST.MF from my servlet-api jar I got following details:

Specification-Title: Java API for Servlets 
Specification-Version: 3.1 
Specification-Vendor: Sun Microsystems, Inc. 
Implementation-Title: javax.servlet 

Which says that its having 3.1. So is there any other reason for this error? Please help

Answer 1

Check all your Maven (or equivalent) dependencies and make sure that you - or most likely another dependency - are not pulling in a pre-3.1 version of the javax.servlet / servlet-api that may be taking precedence over what's in your Tomcat 8. If you've manually deployed, make sure you haven't manually copied any servlet-api JARs into Tomcat itself.

See: https://stackoverflow.com/a/26232535/954442

Answer 2

The method getVirtualServerName has been added in ServletContext in Servlet 3.1. See the java doc's method getVirtualServerName .

This problem has 3 primary causes:

1. Your servlet version is older than 3.1.

2. Some other jar has the servlet with a version older than 3.1.

3. Your tomcat version is older than 8

to solve it, you can try the below way.

I. Check your pom.xml for the code below.

  <dependency>
       <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
       <artifactId>javax.servlet-api</artifactId>
       <version>3.1.0</version>
    </dependency>

if your pom.xml has the above code, it would still has that problem. you can do the second way.

II. to check your other jar has refer to the javax.servlet-api jar. for example, the org.apache.santuario has refer to the javax.servlet-api jar. the pom.xml:

<dependency>  
    <groupId>org.apache.santuario</groupId>  
    <artifactId>xmlsec</artifactId>  
    <version>1.4.3</version>   
</dependency> 

but when you look at the maven dependencies, it refer to the javax.servlet-api jar whose version is 2.3 older than 3.1.

so you should exclude the 2.3 version. pom.xml:

<!-- exclude servlet-api 2.3 jar-->  
<dependency>  
    <groupId>org.apache.santuario</groupId>  
    <artifactId>xmlsec</artifactId>  
    <version>1.4.3</version>  
    <exclusions>  
        <exclusion>  
            <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>  
            <artifactId>servlet-api</artifactId>  
        </exclusion>  
    </exclusions>  
</dependency>  

<!-- servlet-api 3.1 version has getVirtualServerName() -->  
<dependency>  
    <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>  
    <artifactId>javax.servlet-api</artifactId>  
    <version>3.1.0</version>  
</dependency> 

III. spring boot run the default tomcat 7. so define your tomcat version 8 instead of tomcat 7. so add the code your pom.xml:

   <properties>
        <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
        <project.reporting.outputEncoding>UTF-8</project.reporting.outputEncoding>
        <java.version>1.8</java.version>
        <tomcat.version>8.5.5</tomcat.version>
    </properties>

Answer 3

I had this error on IntelliJ with maven after updating IntelliJ.

I could run the tests with maven but not from my IDE.

I solved the problem by removing the ./idea and project.iml files and reloading the project.

Answer 4

If you have used this dependency:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.google.oauth-client</groupId>
    <artifactId>google-oauth-client-jetty</artifactId>
    <version>1.23.0</version>
</dependency>

Then please exclude as below:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.google.oauth-client</groupId>
    <artifactId>google-oauth-client-jetty</artifactId>
    <version>1.23.0</version>
    <exclusions>
        <exclusion>
            <artifactId>servlet-api</artifactId>
            <groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
        </exclusion>
    </exclusions>
</dependency>

Answer 5

Spring boot will run tomcat 7 per default, you have to override maven build tomcat.version in your pom.xml. See below to run tomcat 8.0.30

<properties>
  <tomcat.version>8.0.30</tomcat.version>
</properties>

Should fix your problem.

Answer 6

Solved On my mac with java 8 was facing issue with downloaded tomcat from site and unzip.

My issue got solved because there was a extra servlet-api.jar file which was getting picked up. It was coming from /Library/Java/Extensions/servlet-api.jar

For finding it in your system you can use sudo find / -name servlet-api.jar

Removed it by backing it up somewhere else.

I was following this for intallation https://gist.github.com/ddanailov-nmdp/c97aba2ca926b9627f6b4f7174083a32

Answer 7

Assuming this problem appears when you ran the application in Eclipse. Use Dependency Hierarchy view to search for servlet-api in pom.xm

Answer 8

After a huge pain & sifting through all these stackoverflow answers the only thing that ended up working for me was downgrading from tomcat8 to tomcat7. I know this isn't an ideal solution, and perhaps it was just a fresh install of tomcat that solved my problem. If all else fails give that a shot.

Answer 9

I attach gradle style dependencies code.

dependencies {
    compileOnly("javax.servlet:javax.servlet-api:3.1.0")

Answer 10

This surely has something to do with the version of javax.servlet and version of Tomcat.

In my case, it went away when I declared javax.servlet dependency in gradle with no version. Like this -

compile('javax.servlet:servlet-api')