Adding Tomcat Library to Maven

Question

I am taking my first crack at Maven and ran into a problem. We have an application that is deployed on Tomcat 6. We have several jar files added to the lib folder of tomcat. Then in our build path we add this tomcat library.

How can I add the tomcat library to maven? Is this a bad way to do this? Are there any alternatives?

Thanks in advance

what tomcat library do you rely on specifically? :O is it not one of the servlet-api (i.e. standard j2ee) ones? — Liv, Apr 27 '11 at 16:43
They are jar files we developed and use in our new projects. — blong824, Apr 27 '11 at 16:45

Sean Patrick Floyd · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-27T16:49:48.860

9

Anything in tomcat's lib directory should be a maven dependency with scope provided:

provided
This is much like compile, but indicates you expect the JDK or a container to provide the dependency at runtime. For example, when building a web application for the Java Enterprise Edition, you would set the dependency on the Servlet API and related Java EE APIs to scope provided because the web container provides those classes. This scope is only available on the compilation and test classpath, and is not transitive.

Source: Maven Dependency Scope

Example:

<dependency>
    <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
    <artifactId>servlet-api</artifactId>
    <version>2.5</version>
    <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>

If the libraries are your own, you will have to install or deploy them to a local or remote repository.

edited Apr 27 '11 at 16:49

answered Apr 27 '11 at 16:44

Sean Patrick Floyd

292,901
67
465
588

Well our tomcat lib folder has the following in it: a jndi.properties file, mysql-connector.X.jar, postGis.x.jar, postGreSQL.x.jar, ourJarFile.jar, and another customJar.jar. I am guessing I can make mysql, postgre, and postgis dependencies, but I an unclear about how to handle our custom jars and the jndi properties file. – blong824 Apr 27 '11 at 16:53
@blong perhaps use scope system: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4959007/using-closed-source-dependencies-with-maven/4960243#4960243 – Sean Patrick Floyd Apr 27 '11 at 17:15

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 27 '11 at 16:43

1

You should add the dependencies to the maven project, apart from the Tomcat installation. Then, set their scope to "provided" so that they're not bundled with the artifact.

answered Apr 27 '11 at 16:43

Joseph Ottinger

4,911
1
22
23

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 27 '11 at 16:44

You should list each of the dependencies of the project in the <dependencies> section of your POM.

This way Maven knows to compile against them, and to include these dependencies in the WEB-INF/lib folder of the .war file it packages for you. IDEs that support Maven can then include these libraries in the classpath they use to display/build/run your code as well.

Adding Tomcat Library to Maven

3 Answers3