I have purchased DigitalOcean server and I am trying to run a java application. I am using ubuntu OS and tomcat 7 server where my webapps folder is located in : /usr/share/tomcat7 Now, I have scp my ROOT.war in the folder and restarted tomcat server and apache. But my application is not running. In the file catalina.2014-02-09.log, it shows: java.io.IOException: Unable to create the directory [/usr/share/tomcat7/webapps/ROOT/META-INF] at org.apache.catalina.startup.ExpandWar.expand(ExpandWar.java:132) at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.fixDocBase(ContextConfig.java:697) at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.init(ContextConfig.java:820) at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.lifecycleEvent(ContextConfig.java:363) at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleSupport.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleSupport.java:119) at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleBase.java:90) at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.setStateInternal(LifecycleBase.java:401) at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.init(LifecycleBase.java:110) at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.start(LifecycleBase.java:139) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChildInternal(ContainerBase.java:89 One more error I see in the same log is : java.lang.IllegalStateException at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.loadClass(WebappClassLoader.java:1587) at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.loadClass(WebappClassLoader.java:1546) at org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect$1.convert(MySQLDialect.java:404) at org.hibernate.exception.internal.StandardSQLExceptionConverter.conver I am not able to understand what can be the cause of this issue? As per http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15113700/how-to-make-tomcat-explode-the-war-files , I have configured server.xml for unpack war as But still no results. Please help me out here. Any suggestions can be helpful.