Maven war plugin configuration section and web.xml

I am sure you have been in the following situation: you want to mavenize a web application project.

For this, you create a basic dynamic web application in Eclipse:

You then import the application you want to build:

After the import is done, you create a pom file.

You then update your eclipse configuration files via 'mvn clean eclipse:eclipse'

Finally you try to build your web application (war file) via 'mvn clean install'

However you get a bad surprise: First you are getting a BUILD ERROR:

 Error assembling WAR: webxml attribute is required (or pre-existing WEB-INF/web.xml if executing in update mode)

 ... and even though you seem to have created a war file, it only contains empty META-INF, WEB-INF and classes folders:

The problem is that your web.xml file is not picked up by your maven build, because by default maven expects to find your web.xml inside src/main/resources. 


One option is to refactor your project and move your web.xml under src/main/resources/WEB-INF.

A better option is to modify your pom file and  add a maven war plugin configuration section to your build/plugins section.

In my case, I am specifying that my web.xml file is located under a WebContent folder, relative to the Pom file:

   
   <plugin>
      <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
      <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>2.1.1</version>
      <!-- <configuration> section added to pick up the WEB-INF/web.xml inside WebContent -->
      <configuration>
         <webResources>
            <resource>
               <directory>WebContent</directory>
            </resource>
         </webResources>
      </configuration>
   </plugin>

When done, you just need to rebuild your web application (war file) via 'mvn clean install' and you should then obtain a  BUILD SUCCESSFUL with the war file content you were expecting!