Question

I am trying to create a jar file that is “self contained” concerning the libraries it needs.

Therefore, I created the following ant file:

<project name="srv" default="prod">
    <target name="prod">
        <jar destfile="build/ServerApplication.jar" basedir="bin/">
            <restrict>
             <name name="**/*.class"/>
             <archives>
               <zips>
                 <fileset dir="lib/" includes="**/*.jar"/>
               </zips>
             </archives>
            </restrict>
            <manifest>
                <attribute name="Class-Path" value="." />
                <attribute name="Main-Class" value="my.package.ServerApplication" />
            </manifest>
        </jar>
    </target>
</project>

But, when I try to launch the application using

> java -jar ServerApplication.jar

I get an error

No suitable driver found for jdbc:mysql://localhost/db?user=root&password=

I reckon this is because the com.mysql.jdbc package inside the jar can’t be found. Why is this? When I set the Class-Path to ., shouldn’t the jar be able to find all classes inside that jar?

I opened the jar in a decompiler, and all the classes are where they need to be, see here:

What is going wrong here? My MANIFEST looks like this:

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Ant-Version: Apache Ant 1.8.3
Created-By: 1.7.0_07-b10 (Oracle Corporation)
Main-Class: my.package.ServerApplication
Class-Path: .

Answer 1

You must explicitly write the names of the jars if you want them included separated by spaces. Otherwise I would recommend simply launching your jar and providing the class path as a parameter manually:

java -cp . -jar ServerApplication.jar

See here for more information.