Deploying artifacts to Tomcat with Bamboo Data Center will sometimes fail due to file locking: Unable to delete
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Summary
When using the Deploy Tomcat application task to deploy the generated artifacts to Tomcat, the build fails with the below error in the build logs:
Application failed to deploy: FAIL - Unable to delete [D:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 7.0\webapps\hello]. The continued presence of this file may cause problems.Environment
The solution has been validated in Bamboo 5.7.2 but may be applicable to other versions.
Diagnosis
The build plan with a Deploy Tomcat application task fails and the logs contain the following error:
Starting task 'Deploy test' of type 'com.atlassian.bamboo.plugins.tomcat.bamboo-tomcat-plugin:deployAppTask'
Deploying application with war file 'test.war' to context '/hello' to server 'http://localhost:8080/manager/'
...
Application failed to deploy: FAIL - Unable to delete [D:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 7.0\webapps\hello]. The continued presence of this file may cause problems.
FAIL - Application already exists at path /helloCause
This is more common in Windows OS where Tomcat might lock files or directory locations. In most cases, this happens after the first successfull deployment and subsequent ones might get blocked.
Even though this is more common in Windows, it might affect OSs based on Unix as well and the same solution can be appplied.
Solution
This can be prevented/fixed by adding <Context antiResourceLocking="true"> to Tomcat's context file (<tomcat-home>/conf/context.xml) and restarting the Tomcat service. The antiResourceLocking is set to false by default.
More details can be found in the Tomcat 7.0 documentation.
Additionally, if your Tomcat servlet opens files (for example, through the Scanner class), ensure the files are properly closed as well. Not closing application files after opening them through your servlet can interfere with Tomcat's ability to delete files during undeployment, especially in the WEB-INF/classes directory.
For further support or inquiries, please review the Tomcat documentation and/or reach out to Tomcat support.