Unable to start tomcat based app with java 9 because of default "java.endorsed.dirs" option in catalina.sh.
-Djava.endorsed.dirs=/usr/local/share/tomcat/endorsed is not supported. Endorsed standards and standalone APIs in modular form will be supported via the concept of upgradeable modules.
Error: Could not create the Java Virtual Machine.
Error: A fatal exception has occurred. Program will exit.
Is there a work around for this?
You'll have to hack the script bin/catalina.sh to get this to work.
There are a bunch of lines like this in bin/catalina.sh:
exec "$_RUNJDB" "$LOGGING_CONFIG" $LOGGING_MANAGER $JAVA_OPTS $CATALINA_OPTS \
-Djava.endorsed.dirs="$JAVA_ENDORSED_DIRS" -classpath "$CLASSPATH" \
...
Just remove the second of those lines (the one with -Djava.endorsed.dirs) in each case and you should be back in business.
I'm looking at improving those scripts so that -Djava.endorsed.dirs is not provided to the JVM when the value is empty (which should be the case if you are using Java 9).
UPDATE 2017-11-06
Looks like r1810284 should fix the endorsed.dirs problem. Expect this fix to be included in Tomcat 7.0.83 (or whatever the next 7.0.x version passes voting).
UPDATE 2018-03-07
The first official release of Apache tomcat 7.0.x that includes this fix is Apache Tomcat 7.0.84, voted stable on 2018-01-24.