Spring Boot project in IntelliJ IDEA stops working after reboot

Question

This is probably a newbie question, but I am not able to sort things out.

I've created a Spring Boot JAR-based Maven project using the Spring Initializr interface in IntelliJ IDEA. Its dependencies on Web and JDBC; an embedded instance of Tomcat is used to run the project.

I also have a couple of other Maven dependencies I add without problems from the relevant dialog; I also manually add the Apache Phoenix thin client JAR, that includes a copy of Logback (I am not able to get their Maven repository to work, but I don't think this is relevant to this question).

I am able to run the project flawlessly; after a system reboot (I am on Windows), a cascade of errors follows. First and foremost an exception signaling a conflict between Logback comes:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: LoggerFactory is not a Logback LoggerContext but Logback is on the classpath. Either remove Logback or the competing implementation (class org.slf4j.impl.Log4jLoggerFactory loaded from [...]). If you are using WebLogic you will need to add 'org.slf4j' to prefer-application-packages in WEB-INF/weblogic.xml: org.slf4j.impl.Log4jLoggerFactory.

I would not like to alter the Phoenix client JAR; I am able to follow the instructions to replace the Spring dependency on Logback with another logger (log4j2 for example), but then the embedded Tomcat fails to create the container.

To get back to work, I have to recreate the project from scratch.

Could you please point me in the right direction to pinpoint the actual problem? Thank you.

Post scriptum: I am attaching the content of my pom.xml, apart from some potentially identifying information.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

    <groupId>[RETRACTED]</groupId>
    <artifactId>[RETRACTED]</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <packaging>jar</packaging>

    <name>[RETRACTED]</name>
    <description>[RETRACTED]</description>

    <parent>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
        <version>1.5.9.RELEASE</version>
        <relativePath/> <!-- lookup parent from repository -->
    </parent>

    <properties>
        <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
        <project.reporting.outputEncoding>UTF-8</project.reporting.outputEncoding>
        <java.version>1.8</java.version>
    </properties>

    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-jdbc</artifactId>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>
            <scope>test</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>

    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
                <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>


</project>

Answer 1

Firstly, rather than adding the apache phoenix client (or any other dependencies) manually you should add them to your maven pom.xml, so maven resolves the dependency at build time. If your project has dependencies which maven is failing to resolve this is a separate issue which you need to resolve, but adding them manually is bad practice for a number of reasons.

Once you have added the phoenix client as a dependency, you need to explicitly exclude slf4j-log4j12 and log4j as part of the dependency declaration. The XML should look something like this:

    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.apache.phoenix</groupId>
        <artifactId>phoenix-core</artifactId>
        <version>4.13.1-HBase-1.3</version>
        <exclusions>
            <exclusion>
                <groupId>log4j</groupId>
                <artifactId>log4j</artifactId>
            </exclusion>
            <exclusion>
                <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
                <artifactId>slf4j-log4j12</artifactId>
            </exclusion>
        </exclusions>
    </dependency>

The reason these need excluded is that they are conflicting with the versions bundled in the spring-boot project

Hopefully this will sort your problem.