Spring Boot Port 80 Issues – How to Troubleshoot Startup Problems

Spring Boot starts fine on the default 8080 port. Whenever I try to set the port to 80 in application.properties or using a command line argument I get the error below. Setting the port to, say 9000, works fine. Any ideas?

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( ( )\___ | '_ | '_| | '_ \/ _` | \ \ \ \
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 :: Spring Boot ::            (v1.0.0.RC1)

java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
    at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
    at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:57)
    at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43)
    at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:606)
    at org.springframework.boot.loader.MainMethodRunner.run(MainMethodRunner.java:53)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:744)
Caused by: org.springframework.context.ApplicationContextException: Unable to start embedded container; nested exception is org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedServletContainerException: Unable to start embedded Tomcat
    at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.onRefresh(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:140)
    at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.refresh(AbstractApplicationContext.java:476)
    at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.refresh(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:124)
    at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.refresh(SpringApplication.java:658)
    at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.run(SpringApplication.java:355)
    at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.run(SpringApplication.java:920)
    at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.run(SpringApplication.java:909)
    at com.expedia.www.datacapture.tracking.ServiceRunner.main(ServiceRunner.java:14)
    ... 6 more
Caused by: org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedServletContainerException: Unable to start embedded Tomcat
    at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.tomcat.TomcatEmbeddedServletContainer.initialize(TomcatEmbeddedServletContainer.java:105)
    at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.tomcat.TomcatEmbeddedServletContainer.<init>(TomcatEmbeddedServletContainer.java:68)
    at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.tomcat.TomcatEmbeddedServletContainerFactory.getTomcatEmbeddedServletContainer(TomcatEmbeddedServletContainerFactory.java:254)
    at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.tomcat.TomcatEmbeddedServletContainerFactory.getEmbeddedServletContainer(TomcatEmbeddedServletContainerFactory.java:134)
    at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.createEmbeddedServletContainer(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:164)
    at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.onRefresh(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:137)
    ... 13 more
Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Tomcat connector in failed state
    at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.tomcat.TomcatEmbeddedServletContainer.initialize(TomcatEmbeddedServletContainer.java:101)
    ... 18 more