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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-05T04:57:03+00:00

I’m using maven to build a Java web application which is run in Tomcat.

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I’m using maven to build a Java web application which is run in Tomcat. Certain JAR files (e.g. mail-1.4.1.jar and database drivers) have been put in tomcat/lib directory and the maven dependency set to “provided”. (I’m not 100% sure why, but I think it’s something to do with JNDI.)

Now I have built a standalone executable Java program in the same Maven project which I am trying to execute using mvn exec:java. Unsurprisingly it can’t find mail.jar and I get the error java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javax/mail/Session

How do I specify javax.mail scope=”runtime” for the standalone Java program whilst still being “provided” for the Tomcat app? Do I have to use Maven profiles? If so, where can I find useful documentation on how this works (are the profile’s dependencies additive or do they overwrite the default ones etc?)

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The Raghuram answer is correct, but I want to point out something.

    As Sonatype wrote it in its blog : http://www.sonatype.com/people/2010/01/how-to-create-two-jars-from-one-project-and-why-you-shouldnt/

    I want to be very clear about this answer. We strongly recommend that you not configure a Maven project to create two separate JARs from a single project. It violates one of the most important core concepts of Maven: modularity.

    What you are doing doesn’t seem to be in “The Maven Way”. When you start to be stucked with such a problem, you should always think that this is maybe not the right solution you chose.

    There is a lot of topic about this kind of issue, around dealing multiple artifacts with one single pom :

    Handling multiple artifacts from single maven project

    Maven: Attaching multiple artifacts

    …

    And there is a good one about how deal with multiple environnement profile, as Raghuram suggested :
    Maven best practice for generating artifacts for multiple environments [prod, test, dev] with CI/Hudson support?

    So, I advise you to split your project, thinking about the real realationship between them.
    It may probably drive you to a multimodule project like

    parent
|
+--project:jar
|
+--web-app:war

    …

    Take a look here : http://www.sonatype.com/books/mvnex-book/reference/multimodule.html

    Good luck 🙂

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