Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Datasources, Tomcat and Netbeans

I am currently developing a JSF application using NetBeans 6.0 and Tomcat 6.0.14. When I tried to deploy the application on our production server (by just dumping the .war file in Tomcat's webapps directory, it didn't work properly. I could access the app's start page, but it failed to render the following pages.

A look in tomcat's log files revealed that there was a problem with the mysql driver.

Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver

I tried to make sure that the mysql-connector jar is included in the project's imported libraries and that it can be found in META-INF/lib, but this didn't help. I later found out that in Netbeans, under Tools→Servers→Deployment there is a "Enable JDBC driver deployment option". Disabling this resulted in a replication of the problem on my development machine, even when using NetBeans. So I had to find out what it was that NetBeans was doing when this option was enabled and repeat it on the production server.

I started making a research on the net, based on the error message I was getting. The oslution proposed by most people was to place the mysql driver jar in tomcat's common/lib directory and nowhere else, but this just wouldn't do the trick for me. I also checked that the datasource's declarations in the web.xml and context.xml files were correct.

A final attempt to go through the steps to create and declare a datasource as described in tomcat's website revealed a small detail in step 1: the driver jar file needs to be placed in the $CATALINA_HOME/lib directory rather than $CATALINA_HOME/common/lib.

Still remains to check whether there is a difference in the directory structure in versions 5.5 and 6.0 of tomcat, since no common directory appears to exist in installations of tomcat 6.0.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I cannot write into $CATALINA_HOME/lib/ directory, so I cannot put the JDBC driver there.

But I have found that I can put it into the directory ~/.netbeans/6.0/apache-tomcat-6.0.14_base/nblib/
(on Linux, would be something else on Windows) and then Tomcat loads the driver.

Zzzzz said...

OK that's a handy piece of info. So it seems that Netbeans also adds the jars found in the directory you mention to the classpath when it loads tomcat.
Of course, in that way, things will only work when you start tomcat from within Netbeans...