Aaron Johnson Now with 50% less caffeine!

Ant WAR Task & WEB-INF in lowercase

If you use the Ant war task to create, well, war files, and you notice that the resulting archive has a lowercase WEB-INF folder, it’s a not a bug with Ant, as the documentation states:

We regulary receive bug reports that this task is creating the WEB-INF directory, and thus it is our fault your webapp doesn’t work. The cause of these complaints lies in WinZip, which turns an all upper-case directory into an all lower case one in a fit of helpfulness. Please check that jar xvf yourwebapp.war shows the same behaviour before filing another report.

Easy fix. Open up WinZip and click Options –> Configuration and then check the option for ‘Allow all upper case file names’.

Thanks! Just stumbled over this one. Luckily you’re second on Google’s “ant web-inf” query.

very helpful, thanks for posting

Thanks for posting - solved my issue

Thank you. Incredibly helpful. We have been debugging this issue for a while now, and this will help us get toward the real problem.