I have a simple Spring Boot application that gets messages from a JMS queue and saves some data to a log file, but does not need a web server. Is there any way of starting S
Spring boot will not include embedded tomcat if you don't have Tomcat dependencies on the classpath.
You can view this fact yourself at the class EmbeddedServletContainerAutoConfiguration whose source you can find here.
The meat of the code is the use of the @ConditionalOnClass annotation on the class EmbeddedTomcat
Also, for more information check out this and this guide and this part of the documentation