Can't place Java Libraries outside of the .war

Question

Is there any way that I can access java libraries outside of a .war file in a Jetty server?

I have tried several things, such as expanded wars, but every time I failed, as the server didn't start each time.

Currently I build a war and excluded some JARs from it, then I've placed the JARs in the lib folder in my Jetty Distribution. For some reason though, it is not looking for libraries from that folder. I am using Jetty Version 9.

How should this be properly configured to work?

Answer 1

The lib directory in a jetty distribution is not automatically added to the classpath of the server. The start.jar command builds a classpath depending on what modules are enabled. You can see the constructed classpath this with:

java -jar $JETTY_HOME/start.jar --list-config

There is a module that does add any jars discovered in lib/ext to the classpath, so you can just add --module=ext to the command line or run a command like

java -jar $JETTY_HOME/start.jar --add-to-startd=ext

then any jars in lib/ext will be put on the server classpath.

The next question is will they be visible to the webapp... if they are not in a java or javax or org.eclipse.jetty package, then typically they will be visible by default. If you want to add hidden classes, then you need to adjust the contexts server and system classes configuration.