Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Fixing ClassNotFoundExceptions when working with Eclipse WTP, Maven, Tomcat

Lately, I've been struggling off and on with ClassNotFoundExceptions when starting tomcat from within Eclipse (Springsource Tool Suite, to be exact). My projects are all dependency-managed by the Maven m2eclipse plugin (side note: its really important to install the m2eclipse WTP add-on, found here: http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/sites/m2e-extras so that the web dependencies are all configured correctly).

Anyways, I would tend to encounter this error after restarting Eclipse. When I would investigate, by looking into the [tomcat_home]/wtpwebapps/[app]/WEB-INF/lib folder, it would of course be empty (hence, class not found). I would always flail about aimlessly for hours until it would magically start working again.

I have in the past week discovered a new trick, which has worked *both* times I've tried it: when I got the class not found error, I stopped tomcat, right clicked on my project in the Package Explorer, and clicked Maven -> Update Dependencies. For whatever reason, this caused WTP to publish the dependent jars into WEB-INF/lib, and everything worked again. :-)

Hope that helps save some debugging hours for some!

1 comment:

JGarrido said...

I agree with what 怡潔 said.