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’.
Winzip Options Menu

6 thoughts on “Ant WAR Task & WEB-INF in lowercase”

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

  2. Thank you very much indeed, I was about to get my hammer from the garage and introduce it to the keyboard.

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