Java Cookbook

Packaging a Servlet into a WAR File

Problem

You have a servlet and other web resources, and want to package them into a single file for deploying to the server.

Solution

Use jar to make a web archive (WAR) file.

Discussion

Servlets are server-side components for use in web servers, and are discussed in Chapter 18. They can be packaged for easy installation into a web server. A web application in the Servlet API specification is a collection of HTML and/or JSP pages, servlets, and other resources. A typical directory structure might include the following:

index.html, foo.jsp

Web pages

WEB-INF

Server directory

WEB-INF/web.xml

Descriptor

WEB-INF/classes

Directory for servlets and any classes used by them or by JSP

WEB-INF/lib

Directory for any JAR files of classes needed by classes in the WEB-INF/classes directory

Once you have prepared the files in this way, you just package them up with jar :

jar cvf MyWebApp.war .

You then deploy the resulting WAR file into your web server. For details on this, consult the web server documentation.