If you want to find out where the class is being loaded from, try java -verbose:class -jar foo.jar | grep javax.servlet.ServletContext where foo.jar is the fat JAR produced by Gradle or Maven. For example, the ServletContext class could be getting read from an older servlet-api JAR in a JDK extensions directory instead of your Maven … Read more
This means something is wrong with your application configuration or startup. There is always information about that in the logs – check logs/catalina.out and figure out what is wrong.
You are missing commons-digester3-3.2.jar from Apache Commons Digester. If you are using Maven you can add: <dependency> <groupId>commons-digester</groupId> <artifactId>commons-digester</artifactId> <version>2.1</version> </dependency> to your project dependencies. Update: The jar from the latest download page has a slightly different package structure to what your application expects. You can use this older jar instead.