Including external jar in Tomcat ClassPath

20
votes

In Tomcat I want to use a jar inside a web application. The jar file will exist outside of the Tomcat directory.

To include the jar file in tomcat classpath, I modified the TomcatHome/conf/catalina.properties to include the absolute path of my jar file like,

shared.loader=D:\jaa\MyJarFile.jar

as per the suggestion given in link,

http://www.mulesoft.com/tomcat-classpath

But it throws the error,

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError

I have also tried ,

shared.loader=D:\jaa\*.jar

shared.loader=file:\\D:\jaa\MyJarFile.jar

None of them seem to work :(

If I try placing the jar inside tomcat/lib it seem to work. But I am not allowed to do that.

Please help me out with this issue as I have implementation the next week..

3
javatomcat
Did you try: file://path/to/foldername/jarname.jar?Your syntax is different - Cratylus
Tomcat raises IllegalArgumentsException when I use forward slash(/) while server startup. So I got to use backslash(file:\\D:\jaa\PatMS.jar) - Sathesh
Possible duplicate of How to add JAR libraries to WAR project without facing java.lang.ClassNotFoundException? Classpath vs Build Path vs /WEB-INF/lib - user502187
What worked for me was to use quotes and forward slashes, like shared.folder="C:/Program Files/Java/jdk1.8.0_121/db/lib/*.jar" (on a Windows system). - D.Ogranos

3 Answers

14
votes

I figured myself how to add the classpath for tomcat. Instead of editing catalina.properties, just create a "setenv.sh" in the Tomcat Bin directory with the classpath,

Example,

CLASSPATH=D:\jaa\MyJarFile.jar

I just checked the catalina.sh in Tomcat/bin and these classpath variable will be set while setting the bootstrap as the classpath.

1
votes

I was using IntelliJ and I tried everything like:

  1. Using CtrlAltShiftS (Project Settings) and adding a dependency of mysql-connector.jar. Didn't work. (The only thing that worked was that code completion inside IntelliJ was working fine.
  2. Adding mysql-connector.jar to apache-home/lib/ folder. Didn't work.
  3. Including mysql-connector.jar from Maven inside IntelliJ. Just didn't work.

The thing that worked for me:

Include the mysql-connector.jar file in the PROJECT/web/WEB-INF/lib folder.

No need to add it as a dependency anywhere. Just compile this and it will work fine.

0
votes

I find myself copying extra JARs, which should be available for all contexts and should therefor go into the root loader, into the following directory:

 C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 9.0\lib

But this only possible if you have access to this directory, which might not be the case for all ISPs. At least you can do it at home.

Bye