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Tomcat7 Maven Plugin Invalid Byte Tag in Constant Pool 19

I use tomcat7-maven-plugin to spin up a Tomcat 7 container where I can run my web application. When I added dependencies for log4j2 (version 2.11.0) to my project, I got the error:

org.apache.tomcat.util.bcel.classfile.ClassFormatException:
Invalid byte tag in constant pool: 19

Apparently, log4j2 is a multi-release jar and older versions of Tomcat can’t handle that. So I needed to upgrade my Tomcat maven plugin.

Solution: Update your Tomcat

But how do you update your Tomcat? Its information page shows that it hasn’t been updated for a while, the latest version being 2.2 which runs 7.0.47 by default. Maven Central, on the other hand, shows that the latest version at the moment of this writing is 7.0.86. That’s the version we want.

Change your pom.xml in the following way:

<project>
  <properties>
    <tomcat.version>7.0.86</tomcat.version>
  </properties>
  <plugins>
    <plugin>
      <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.maven</groupId>
      <artifactId>tomcat7-maven-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>2.2</version>
      <configuration>
        <path>/</path>
        <port>7777</port>
      </configuration>
      <dependencies>
        <dependency>
          <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.embed</groupId>
          <artifactId>tomcat-embed-core</artifactId>
          <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
          <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
          <artifactId>tomcat-util</artifactId>
          <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
          <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
          <artifactId>tomcat-coyote</artifactId>
          <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
          <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
          <artifactId>tomcat-api</artifactId>
          <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
          <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
          <artifactId>tomcat-jdbc</artifactId>
          <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
          <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
          <artifactId>tomcat-dbcp</artifactId>
          <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
          <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
          <artifactId>tomcat-servlet-api</artifactId>
          <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
          <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
          <artifactId>tomcat-jsp-api</artifactId>
          <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
          <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
          <artifactId>tomcat-jasper</artifactId>
          <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
          <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
          <artifactId>tomcat-jasper-el</artifactId>
          <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
          <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
          <artifactId>tomcat-el-api</artifactId>
          <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
          <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
          <artifactId>tomcat-catalina</artifactId>
          <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
          <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
          <artifactId>tomcat-tribes</artifactId>
          <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
          <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
          <artifactId>tomcat-catalina-ha</artifactId>
          <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
          <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
          <artifactId>tomcat-annotations-api</artifactId>
          <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
          <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
          <artifactId>tomcat-juli</artifactId>
          <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
          <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.embed</groupId>
          <artifactId>tomcat-embed-logging-juli</artifactId>
          <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
          <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.embed</groupId>
          <artifactId>tomcat-embed-logging-log4j</artifactId>
          <version>${tomcat.version}</version>
        </dependency>
      </dependencies>
    </plugin>
  </plugins>
</project>