Geoserver fails One or more listeners failed to start

Question

I am running GeoServer 2.7.1 on Tomcat 7.0.62 on OS X 10.10. I have installed Tomcat with Homebrew and copied the GeoServer 2.7.1 war file to the webapps dir. When I try to start GeoServer it fails with this message.

SEVERE: One or more listeners failed to start. Full details will be found in the appropriate container log file

I see no other specific errors in catalina.out. Maybe this is an issue below?

INFO: At least one JAR was scanned for TLDs yet contained no TLDs. Enable debug logging for this logger for a complete list of JARs that were scanned but no TLDs were found in them. Skipping unneeded JARs during scanning can improve startup time and JSP compilation time.
Jun 22, 2015 3:48:20 PM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext startInternal
SEVERE: One or more listeners failed to start. Full details will be found in the appropriate container log file
Jun 22, 2015 3:48:20 PM org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext startInternal
SEVERE: Context [/geoserver] startup failed due to previous errors

Anyone know where I can start looking for config errors etc. ?

Answer 1

Thanks @S.L. Barth, that was the problem. I had to downgrade Java8 to Java7. Now it works! This guide was helpful

Answer 2

I had a similar problem, adding setenv.sh file in tomcat/bin folder or changing the jdk path in service script (if you are starting tomcat as a service) resolves this issue. The web-application you are deploying depends on specific jdk version.