[BUG] latest tomcat:9-jdk8-temurin-noble breaks xnat-docker-compose

[akluiber]

Just FYI,

I created an issue for the xnat-docker-compose github here:

https://github.com/NrgXnat/xnat-docker-compose/issues/107

[Rick Herrick]

Thanks for the report, Alex. I replicated this locally, so we'll have a look and let you know what we find.

Rick Herrick 

Senior Software Developer

ri...@xnatworks.io

https://xnatworks.io | Find us on LinkedIn! 

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[Rick Herrick]

I did a bit of testing and found that the culprit here is the Tomcat version. Stay away from Tomcat 9.0.116! This is the latest version on Homebrew, the latest Tomcat image on Docker Hub, etc. The issue isn't XNAT and it isn't the Docker image per se, it's something in 9.0.116. Basically any part of XNAT that uses Spawner (which is a JSON-based UI definition and rendering system inside XNAT) will fail to display. This is usually accompanied by an error in the browser console, so e.g. for http://localhost:8080/setup (this is the setup page for an uninitialized XNAT running locally on top of Tomcat 9.0.116) I get:

GET http://localhost:8080/setup/ net::ERR_INCOMPLETE_CHUNKED_ENCODING 200 (OK)

There will also be messages in the error logs, e.g. turbine.log shows:

2026-03-25 14:45:21,365 [http-nio-8080-exec-8] ERROR org.apache.turbine.Turbine - Turbine.handleException:
java.lang.IllegalStateException: getOutputStream() has already been called for this response
    at org.apache.catalina.connector.Response.getWriter(Response.java:546)
    at org.apache.catalina.connector.ResponseFacade.getWriter(ResponseFacade.java:187)
    at javax.servlet.ServletResponseWrapper.getWriter(ServletResponseWrapper.java:108)

    ...

If you're running in docker-compose, the easiest fix is to modify the file xnat/Dockerfile from this:

FROM tomcat:9.0-jdk8-temurin-noble

To this:

FROM tomcat:9.0.115-jdk8-temurin-noble

If you have an existing xnat-web image, you'll want to delete that or force a build with docker-compose before restarting.

Note that the setup issue that Alex identified only affects new uninitialized installations, but the larger issue will cause other problems, like the Administer and Plugin Settings pages not displaying properly (well, at all!).

Rick Herrick 

Senior Software Developer

ri...@xnatworks.io

https://xnatworks.io | Find us on LinkedIn!