tomcat 5.5 web.xml change WEB-INF/lib directory

Question

I have a jruby rails app that has some jar dependencies in rails lib/java. I prefer this to just putting them straight in lib as it separates my java libs from ruby libs. Works locally using jruby. Problem is, on deploy, tomcat is looking for a bunch of these jars (such as jruby) in WEB-INF/lib, not WEB-INF/lib/java.

I think i need to put some config in the web.xml that tells tomcat to also look in lib/java, but i can't find ANY docs on the matter.

I don't want to modify tomcat's system wide classpath, I just want to tell its class loader to check a directory other than WEB-INF/lib for this particular app only

Can anyone enlighten me on how to do this?

Answer 1

you can't change this directory, j2ee spec says that all libs go in WEB-INF/lib. That is where they are supposed to go.

Answer 2

Just stay with your two directories in your project folder, but join them, when creating your .war file. This should be pretty easy with apache ant and other build tools.