Unable to find Java

[marcoliceti]

Hi, I'm developing a Spring Boot application on Ubuntu (running inside a Vagrant-managed virtual machine). I'm following this official guide to run my app as a service. So I did:

$ sudo ln -s /var/myapp/myapp.jar /etc/init.d/myapp

(Of course I previously generated the jar with mvn clean package and changed /var/myapp/myapp.jar with the actual path for my jar)

It worked for a couple of days. Now when I do:

sudo service myapp start

...it says Unable to find Java.

I can still run my app with java -jar myapp.jar.

Here are some relevant settings from my bash profile:

export PATH=$PATH:~/java/bin:~/maven/bin
export JAVA_HOME=~/java

(Note: I installed both Java and Maven by downloading the official binaries into my home directory. Also, I shortened the full, detailed names, e.g. apache-maven-3.3.9-bin -> maven).

Also, this is the output from mvn -version:

Maven home: /home/vagrant/maven
Java version: 1.8.0_77, vendor: Oracle Corporation
Java home: /home/vagrant/java/jre
Default locale: en_US, platform encoding: UTF-8
OS name: "linux", version: "3.13.0-68-generic", arch: "amd64", family: "unix"

Maybe there's a bug here?

[wilkinsona]

Here are some relevant settings from my bash profile:

It doesn't matter what's set in your bash profile, it's the profile of the user that will actually run the launch script that matters. As you're running the service with sudo, that means that it's the superuser's bash profile that's of interest.

Maybe there's a bug here?

Given that you said it worked for a couple of days and then stopped working, I think it's unlikely that there's a bug in the script. It's more likely that something has changed on your machine.

The script looks in the following places for the java executable:

• $JAVA_HOME/bin/java
• On the $PATH
• /usr/bin/java

java needs to be available in one of these places for the superuser. My suspicion is that that is no longer the case.

[marcoliceti]

You're probably right.

I'm searching for solutions to preserve my user's environment variables when using sudo. I tried:

sudo -E service myapp start

But I still get Unable to find Java. A temporary workaround is to simply remove sudo: I'm able to start and stop the service with just service myapp start.

But since 99% this is not a Spring Boot bug, I'm closing the issue. Thanks for the quick and helpful response!

[marcoliceti]

Ok, here is what's happening: service only accepts LANG and TERM variables, so the -E option is useless.

But it is useful when starting the service like this:

sudo -E /etc/init.d/recommender start

[webskyer]

Link java to /sbin,will fix the error.
ln -s /usr/local/jdk/bin/java /sbin/java
:)

[marcoliceti]

Hi. I ended up using supervisor to control my app (instead of running it as a service).

[ziggear]

First, you can use following command to get java location:

where java

Then, link this java to '/usr/bin/java':

ln -s /path/to/java /usr/bin/java

see: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/blob/master/spring-boot-tools/spring-boot-loader-tools/src/main/resources/org/springframework/boot/loader/tools/launch.script
and search "Unable to find Java"

[jcstier]

I'm seeing this same problem... no matter how I symlink java.

root@my-app1:~# echo $JAVA_HOME
/opt/jdk1.8.0_111
root@my-app1:~# which java
/opt/jdk1.8.0_111/bin/java
root@my-app1:~# systemctl status my-test.service
● my-test.service - LSB: my-test
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/my-test; bad; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Sat 2017-01-07 22:12:34 UTC; 23min ago
     Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
  Process: 2100 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/my-test start (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)

Jan 07 22:12:34 my-app1 systemd[1]: Starting LSB: my-test...
Jan 07 22:12:34 my-app1 my-test[2100]: Unable to find Java
Jan 07 22:12:34 my-app1 systemd[1]: my-test.service: Control process exited, code=exited status=1
Jan 07 22:12:34 my-app1 systemd[1]: Failed to start LSB: my-test.
Jan 07 22:12:34 my-app1 systemd[1]: my-test.service: Unit entered failed state.
Jan 07 22:12:34 my-app1 systemd[1]: my-test.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

I'm using:

<parent>
       <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
       <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
       <version>1.4.1.RELEASE</version>
   </parent>

[jcstier]

I got it working by running my service under a user with java env defined... not sure why I it wouldn't run as root.. it had the same java env. But probably better not to run as root anyhow :)

[aldoabril]

In my case @webskyer's comments fix my problem