Question

I’m creating a WAR (TomcatHeartbeat.war) on my Windows machine and deploying it locally to Tomcat (v7.0.19). It deploys and runs without any errors.

I then take that same WAR and copy it (“deploy” it) to a CentOS Linux server, running the same version of Tomcat (but for Linux, obviously!) and get the following errors immediately:

2012-02-08 10:36:23,110 [ContainerBackgroundProcessor[StandardEngine[Catalina]]] INFO  org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig- Deploying web application archive TomcatHeartbeat.war
2012-02-08 10:36:23,117 [ContainerBackgroundProcessor[StandardEngine[Catalina]]] ERROR org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig- Exception fixing docBase for context [/TomcatHeartbeat]
java.util.zip.ZipException: invalid END header (bad central directory offset)
    at java.util.zip.ZipFile.open(Native Method)
    at java.util.zip.ZipFile.<init>(ZipFile.java:127)
    ...(rest of stack trace ommitted for brevity)

I suspect this is a “Windows/Linux” thing? What else would explain the fact that the WAR runs perfectly fine on my machine but not on our Linux server?

I also suspect that the remedy will be to build & deploy the WAR right there on the same machine.

Am I on-track, or way off-base here? Thanks in advance!

Edit:
The method I am using to copy the WAR from Windows to Linux is:

• Copy the file from my local disk to a network directory, which is actually on a Linux machine, yet I have access to it through Windows Explorer
• FTP the WAR from that Linux machine to the application server (both Linux machines are same version of CentOS)

Answer 1

Are you definitely using BIN mode for FTP? The default is ASCII, which could play havoc with a .ZIP (or, of course, a .WAR) and could introduce corruption issues. I’d look at this first of all.

This is particularly likely with a command-line FTP operation; I believe UIs, certainly on Windows, mask it nicely.