java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.commo

Question

This question already has an answer here:

• java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.commons.fileupload.FileItemFactory 2 answers

I have followed this tutorial for using servlet for file upload.

Here is the folder structure (Dynamic project created using Eclipse). I am NOT using maven for this simple project. I added the external jar to the build path.

when I start Tomcat and deploy this application by right-clicking on the project in Eclipse > Run on Server I get

Caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/commons/fileupload/FileItemFactory
    at java.lang.Class.getDeclaredFields0(Native Method)
    at java.lang.Class.privateGetDeclaredFields(Class.java:2499)
    at java.lang.Class.getDeclaredFields(Class.java:1811)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.Introspection.getDeclaredFields(Introspection.java:106)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.WebAnnotationSet.loadFieldsAnnotation(WebAnnotationSet.java:270)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.WebAnnotationSet.loadApplicationServletAnnotations(WebAnnotationSet.java:139)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.WebAnnotationSet.loadApplicationAnnotations(WebAnnotationSet.java:65)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.applicationAnnotationsConfig(ContextConfig.java:415)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.configureStart(ContextConfig.java:892)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.lifecycleEvent(ContextConfig.java:386)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleSupport.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleSupport.java:117)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleBase.java:90)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.startInternal(StandardContext.java:5380)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.start(LifecycleBase.java:150)
    ... 6 more
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.commons.fileupload.FileItemFactory
    at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.loadClass(WebappClassLoader.java:1720)
    at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.loadClass(WebappClassLoader.java:1571)
    ... 20 more

please help me with what is going wrong here and how to fix this?

Answer 1

You need to copy the required commons jars into your /WEB-INF/lib folder as well.

commons-io-2.4.jar
commons-fileupload-1.3.1.jar

The reason is that just adding the jar dependencies to your Eclipse project's build path does not make them automatically available on Tomcat. Since, the dependencies are missing (not found in the lib folder) your web app's deployment fails.