TeamCity 7 upgrade “failed to install tomcat service”

I was just (somewhat belatedly) upgrading to TeamCity 7.0 from 6.5 on a Windows Server 2008 box when I got an error. I’ve upgraded numerous times in the past without any problem, but this time I got the message “failed to install tomcat service“. I was advised to check my permissions and settings and either abort, retry or ignore, with the latter being deemed inadvisable.

Googling didn’t turn up much, but after digging around I discovered that the “TeamCity Web Server” service was in a “Disabled” state. Attempts to do anything with it gave me the message “This service is marked for deletion.”

With the help of this StackOverflow answer, I quickly figured out that I’d started the upgrade process with Windows’ Services viewer open. For whatever reason, this kept a hook into the outgoing TeamCity service which couldn’t be fully uninstalled as a result.

The solution was simple – close the Services window and retry. The installation completed without any further issue.

Whilst this is a bit of an edge case, the fact that the TeamCity error message didn’t directly reference the “TeamCity Web Server” service didn’t help. A clearer message would have sped up the diagnosis.

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