DRAFT KB-XXXX Tomcat fails to deploy Appian with "IllegalArgumentException"

Symptoms

Tomcat fails to deploy Appian with the following error in <APPIAN_HOME>/logs/tomcat-stdOut.log:

WARNING [localhost-startStop-1] org.apache.naming.NamingContext.lookup Unexpected exception resolving reference
 java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Illegal base64 character 3a

Cause

The un-encoded database password contains special characters which causes an issue with the encoding and decoding done by Tomcat. The Appian Team has observed this issue when the database password contained the ":" character.

Action

Ensure that special characters are not included in the un-encoded database password.

Affected Versions

This article applies to Appian 18.3 and later.

Last Reviewed: September 2018