Spring Boot App does not deploy on Glassfish 4.1

Question

I have a vanilla spring boot app that consists of the following pom.xml

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

    <groupId>xxx.alexius</groupId>
    <artifactId>myapp</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <packaging>war</packaging>

    <name>my app</name>
<description>Core Application Platform</description>
<parent>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
    <version>1.2.2.RELEASE</version>
    <relativePath/> <!-- lookup parent from repository -->
</parent>
<properties>
    <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
    <java.version>1.7</java.version>
</properties>

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-mongodb</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-mobile</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-social-facebook</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-social-twitter</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-thymeleaf</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>mysql</groupId>
        <artifactId>mysql-connector-java</artifactId>
        <scope>runtime</scope>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.postgresql</groupId>
        <artifactId>postgresql</artifactId>
        <version>9.4-1201-jdbc41</version>
        <scope>runtime</scope>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>
        <scope>test</scope>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>2.3.2</version>
            <configuration>
                <source>1.7</source>
                <target>1.7</target>
                <compilerArgument>-Xlint:all</compilerArgument>
                <showWarnings>true</showWarnings>
                <showDeprecation>true</showDeprecation>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

When I deploy this to a Tomcat everything works fine but when I try to deploy this on a Glassfish 4.1 server I get the following error

SEVERE:   Class [ liquibase/integration/spring/SpringLiquibase ] not found. Error while loading [ class org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.liquibase.LiquibaseAutoConfiguration$LiquibaseConfiguration ]
SEVERE:   Exception while deploying the app [platform]
SEVERE:   Exception during lifecycle processing
java.lang.ArrayStoreException: sun.reflect.annotation.TypeNotPresentExceptionProxy

Any ideas on what is going wrong? Is it a Spring or Glassfish bug?

Answer 1

It looks like this a bug in Glassfish: GLASSFISH-21265

You can try to get around that by adding metadata-complete="true" in your web.xml like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app version="3.1" 
         metadata-complete="true"
         xmlns="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee" 
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee http://xmlns.jcp.org/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_1.xsd">
</web-app>

The metadata-complete="true" indicates that the JAR files in /WEB-INF/lib doesn't need to be scanned for Servlet 3.0 specific annotations, but the webapp's own classes will still be scanned.

See also:

• Spring Boot on Glassfish
• Spring Boot app deployed to Glassfish is giving strange results
• Cannot deploy simple project on Glassfish 3.1.2 and 4.0.0+
• Spring.io Blog - Deploying Spring Boot Applications