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

Answer 1

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.