Why would a maven-war-plugin generate a JAR instead of a WAR?

Question

I am following this Contract first using CXF tutorial and while the resulting pom.xml generates sources and even completes build successfully, it fails to create a WAR file.

Instead, it creates a JAR file.

My understanding is that the part in the pom.xml that's responsible for creating the WAR is:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
  <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>2.1.1</version>
  <configuration>
    <outputDirectory>D:/path/to/profile/autodeploy</outputDirectory>
  </configuration>
 </plugin>

I don't see any <goal> or <execution> element there (unlike in the build-helper-maven-plugin one), but I also understand that with this plugin this is implied as even the official usage page demonstrates:

<project>
  ...
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.4</version>
        <configuration>
          <webappDirectory>/sample/servlet/container/deploy/directory</webappDirectory>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
  ...
</project>

So... what am I missing?

What could possibly explain a maven-war-plugin that behaves in unexpected way like this and produces a JAR instead of a WAR by default?

Is there a way to force it to produce a WAR?

Solution 1

packaging should be as below.

<packaging>war</packaging>

if it won't help then try binding your plug-in configuration with a lifecycle phase.

Solution 2

in your project definition , please check if packaging is missing or not , it should be some thing like this .

   <groupId>some.groupid</groupId>
   <artifactId>My Web Application</artifactId>
   <version>0.0.1</version>
   <packaging>war</packaging>
   <description>My First Web Application</description>

By default maven war plugin binds to package phase of the lifecycle ,so its important that we should mention the type of packaging we want once the build is done.

I would like to suggest to have a look at the Maven specs for war plugin.