Learn to Debug Tomcat Remotely Using Intellij Ide

This set of instructions will guide you on how to enable debugging of your Java project running on Tomcat inside the Intellij IDE.

1. Start Tomcat in debug mode.

>catalina jpda start

2. Enable remote debugging inside Intellij.

2.1 Inside Intellij, open Run / Edit Configuration.

2.2 Click the + button, and select Remote JVM Debug.

2.3 Change the value of the Name field accordingly.

2.4 Set the Host, to the IP address where your Tomcat server is running. Or localhost, if running locally.

2.5 Change the port accordingly, by default its value is 8000.

2.6 Make sure that the value of the "Command line arguments for remote JVM:" is:

-agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=8000

2.7 It should look like this:

2.8 The new Run Configuration should appear in Intellij's configuration dropdown.

3. At this point Tomcat should be running, to attach a debugger, select Remote Tomcat (the name of the Run configuration we created) in the run configuration dropdown and it should work.