org.apache.catalina.LifecycleException: Failed to start component [StandardServer[8005]]A child container failed during start

I had a similar error and fixed it by following steps: 1. Under Servers project (which gets created itself when you add Apache Tomcat Server in Eclipse), open server.xml 2. Comment out the line

<Context docBase=... />

This will prevent multiple context tags to be created upon each request

1) Stop the server
2) Clean Tomcat's work directory

If you are not using annotation based Servlet then please remove annotation @WebServlet("/YourServletName") from the starting of the servlet. This annotation confuses the mapping with web.xml, after removing this annotation Tomcat server will work properly.