Unable to run a storm-starter topology from the Storm tutorial

To be little bit more precise with regard to Nick's answer.

In storm-starter/pom.xml the dependency storm-core is specified with scope "provided":

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.apache.storm</groupId>
  <artifactId>storm-core</artifactId>
  <version>${project.version}</version>
  <!--
    Use "provided" scope to keep storm out of the jar-with-dependencies
    For IntelliJ dev, intellij will load properly.
  -->
  <scope>${provided.scope}</scope>
</dependency>

If you run locally using LocalCluster you need to include storm-core as dependency with default scope "compile", ie, just remove the scope tag, and run mvn -DskipTests package in storm-starter again.

NoClassDefFoundError regarding Storm, usually refers to errors coming from the <scope> tag in your pom.xml.

If you are trying to run the project on a cluster of machines where you have installed Storm, the <scope> should be "provided" (<scope>provide</scope>), else if you are trying to execute the topology locally, the scope must be set to "compile".

Hope this helps.