How to create war files

I've always just selected Export from Eclipse. It builds the war file and includes all necessary files. Providing you created the project as a web project that's all you'll need to do. Eclipse makes it very simple to do.

You can use Ant to set up, compile, WAR, and deploy your solution.

<target name="default" depends="setup,compile,buildwar,deploy"></target>

You can then execute one click in Eclipse to run that Ant target. Here are examples of each of the steps:

Preconditions

We'll assume that you have your code organized like:

• ${basedir}/src: Java files, properties, XML config files
• ${basedir}/web: Your JSP files
• ${basedir}/web/lib: Any JARs required at runtime
• ${basedir}/web/META-INF: Your manifest
• ${basedir}/web/WEB-INF: Your web.xml files

Set up

Define a setup task that creates the distribution directory and copies any artifacts that need to be WARred directly:

<target name="setup">
    <mkdir dir="dist" />
    <echo>Copying web into dist</echo>
    <copydir dest="dist/web" src="web" />
    <copydir dest="dist/web/WEB-INF/lib" src="${basedir}/../web/WEB-INF/lib" />
</target>

Compile

Build your Java files into classes and copy over any non-Java artifacts that reside under src but need to be available at runtime (e.g. properties, XML files, etc.):

<target name="compile">
    <delete dir="${dist.dir}/web/WEB-INF/classes" />
    <mkdir dir="${dist.dir}/web/WEB-INF/classes" />
    <javac destdir="${dist.dir}/web/WEB-INF/classes" srcdir="src">
        <classpath>
            <fileset dir="${basedir}/../web/WEB-INF/lib">
                  <include name="*" />
            </fileset>
        </classpath>
    </javac>
    <copy todir="${dist.dir}/web/WEB-INF/classes">
        <fileset dir="src">
            <include name="**/*.properties" />
            <include name="**/*.xml" />
        </fileset>
    </copy>
</target>

Build WAR

Create the WAR itself:

<target name="buildwar">
    <war basedir="${basedir}/dist/web" destfile="My.war"
     webxml="${basedir}/dist/web/WEB-INF/web.xml">
        <exclude name="WEB-INF/**" />
        <webinf dir="${basedir}/dist/web/WEB-INF/">
            <include name="**/*.jar" />
        </webinf>
    </war>
</target>

Deploy

Finally, you can set up a task to deploy the WAR directly into your Tomcat deploy location:

<target name="deploy">
    <copy file="My.war" todir="${tomcat.deploydir}" />
</target>

Click and go!

Once all this is set up, simply launching the default target from Eclipse will compile, WAR, and deploy your solution.

The advantage of this approach is that it will work outside Eclipse as well as within Eclipse and can be used to easily share your deployment strategy (e.g. via source control) with other developers who are also working on your project.