I recently had to deal with this little bugger as we moved from the OpenJDK 8 package supplied by the Linux distro of choice to AdoptOpenJDK 8. It is important to know that we completely uninstalled OpenJDK, including all its transient dependencies.

(And in due time we’ll uninstall Java 8 and replace that grandpa as well)

As a result, parts of our application didn’t work any longer, resulting in this nice and shiny Java stacktrace.

2019-05-03 08:22:07,345 ERROR [qtp1896708863-35] [PlotChartController] [/][/][/]- error while creating chart image
java.lang.NullPointerException
        at sun.awt.FontConfiguration.getVersion(FontConfiguration.java:1264)
        at sun.awt.FontConfiguration.readFontConfigFile(FontConfiguration.java:219)
        at sun.awt.FontConfiguration.init(FontConfiguration.java:107)
        at sun.awt.X11FontManager.createFontConfiguration(X11FontManager.java:774)
        at sun.font.SunFontManager$2.run(SunFontManager.java:431)
        at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
        at sun.font.SunFontManager.<init>(SunFontManager.java:376)
        at sun.awt.FcFontManager.<init>(FcFontManager.java:35)
        at sun.awt.X11FontManager.<init>(X11FontManager.java:57)
        at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance0(Native Method)
        at sun.reflect.NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(NativeConstructorAccessorImpl.java:62)
        at sun.reflect.DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.newInstance(DelegatingConstructorAccessorImpl.java:45)
        at java.lang.reflect.Constructor.newInstance(Constructor.java:423)
        at java.lang.Class.newInstance(Class.java:442)
        at sun.font.FontManagerFactory$1.run(FontManagerFactory.java:83)
        at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
        at sun.font.FontManagerFactory.getInstance(FontManagerFactory.java:74)
        at java.awt.Font.getFont2D(Font.java:491)
        at java.awt.Font.defaultLineMetrics(Font.java:2176)
        at java.awt.Font.getLineMetrics(Font.java:2246)
        at org.jfree.chart.axis.DateAxis.estimateMaximumTickLabelWidth(DateAxis.java:1453)
        at org.jfree.chart.axis.DateAxis.selectHorizontalAutoTickUnit(DateAxis.java:1365)
        at org.jfree.chart.axis.DateAxis.selectAutoTickUnit(DateAxis.java:1340)
        at org.jfree.chart.axis.DateAxis.refreshTicksHorizontal(DateAxis.java:1616)
        at org.jfree.chart.axis.DateAxis.refreshTicks(DateAxis.java:1556)
        at org.jfree.chart.axis.ValueAxis.reserveSpace(ValueAxis.java:807)
        at org.jfree.chart.plot.CombinedDomainXYPlot.calculateAxisSpace(CombinedDomainXYPlot.java:364)
        at org.jfree.chart.plot.CombinedDomainXYPlot.draw(CombinedDomainXYPlot.java:442)
        at org.jfree.chart.JFreeChart.draw(JFreeChart.java:1235)
        at org.jfree.chart.JFreeChart.createBufferedImage(JFreeChart.java:1409)
        at org.jfree.chart.JFreeChart.createBufferedImage(JFreeChart.java:1389)
        at org.jfree.chart.ChartUtilities.writeChartAsPNG(ChartUtilities.java:183)

I obviously removed some (a lot) parts to make it more readable and to hide corporate IP 😉 But this is the relevant part.

I found this bug report on Github and for once, plowing through the comments, it helped me. As is mentioned there, the culprit is the missing “fontconfig” package. So, I added another Ansible task to our playbook to provision the server et voila, the problem is gone.

- name: Install fontconfig package
  package:
    name: fontconfig
    state: present
    tags:
      - java

As mentioned earlier, we had wiped all that was relevant to OpenJDK off the system and by doing so, also uninstalled the “fontconfig” package. Otherwise this error wouldn’t have surfaced. But that’s the benefit of starting with a clean slate. This way you know if something is missing and don’t get surprised by errors all of a sudden while, at the same time, it is working on another machine.