How to generate a WAR file for a Java project without Maven or Eclipse-CodePudding

I am working on a Java Web App project. This project has a fixed file structure and does not use Maven. I want to generate a WAR file so that I can deploy it to Tomcat.

I want to generate the WAR without Eclipse, just via the Java tool chain. Is this possible?

I have put together a minimal reproducible example with the same file structure in a git repo at https://github.com/halloleo/ContextListenerJavaWebAppSampleProject.

CodePudding user response：

A WAR file is a archive (zip/jar) that follows a certain structure. See here for more details. If you want to create a WAR manually you will need to create the structure manually and then create an archive with the extension of .war.

Here is a quick and dirty ant script that can create a WAR file from your structure posted on GitHub

<!-- Compile the classes and copy other files to conform to the WAR structure -->
<target name="compile">
    <mkdir dir="build/WEB-INF/classes" />
    <copy file="WebContent/index.jsp" todir="build" />
    <copydir src="WebContent/WEB-INF/" dest="build/WEB-INF/" />
    <javac srcdir="src" destdir="build/WEB-INF/classes" classpath="WebContent/WEB-INF/lib/javax.servlet-api-4.0.1.jar" />
</target>

<!-- Create the WAR file -->    
<target name="war">
    <mkdir dir="dist" />
    <war destfile="dist/test.war" basedir="build" webxml="WebContent/WEB-INF/web.xml"/>
</target>

Save this as build.xml and run ant clean compile dist to generate the WAR file in dist directory.

NOTE: You may have to install the ant tool if you already dont have it. Also, if you want to go complete tool free - you can read the build.xml file and convert the steps into a 'batch' / 'shell' script (all the steps are self explanatory).

CONCLUSION: Hope this helps. But I still recommend using a tool like Maven or Gradle these will come in handy when the project grows (specially when there are several libraries along with their dependencies)