The build script is already telling you what you should be doing next. Locate and look into the catalina.out file for more details as to why the web app failed to start. As to where the catalina log files are, that depends greatly on what type of Tomcat install this is. If it's integrated in Netbeans then it's located in the .netbeans/7.1.1/apache-tomcat/logs. If it is a debian / ubuntu based linux its found under /var/log/tomcat In either case the catalina log will show the root cause of the failure to start. But it's most likely something in the web.xml that is wrong.