include jar in an executable jar

[Stephen Huey]

I have a small program that does some FTP work with the help of Apache's commons-net-1.2.2.jar file and so every time I execute the Java program, I have to use the classpath flag to reference that JAR file. I would like to package up my Java program into an executable JAR file, and if possible, I'd like to include the Commons Net JAR file inside of my "main" JAR file so that there would be only one simple thing to call to run it (because I would like to hand this off to less-savvy colleagues who need to use it to automate some tasks). Is there any way to do this? If so, how do you make sure that the classes in the JAR file know how to find the classes in the other JAR file? Thanks...

[Ilja Preuss]

Take a look at http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/jar/basics/manifest.html#download

As far as I can tell, that doesn't work for "nested" jar files, though, sorry...

[Dirk Schreckmann]

You could unpack the contents of the JAR you want to include, and then just add them to your JAR.

[Stefan Wagner]

we had the debate some weeks ago:
jar-in-jar talk

[Stephen Huey]

Thanks for all the replies. I'm trying to just JAR up my program and include the classpath to the other JAR file in the manifest so that all someone has to do is drop both of them into the same directory. However, I'm running into this problem:

C:\code\uploadsdownloads>java -jar UploadsDownloads.jar
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/commons/net/ftp/FTPConnectionClosedException

The commons-net-1.2.2.jar containing all that FTP code is in the same directory as the JAR I'm trying to run, and the manifest looks like this:

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Main-Class: UploadsDownloads
Class-Path: ./commons-net-1.2.2.jar

What am I doing wrong? I also tried it with this:

Class-Path: commons-net-1.2.2.jar

[Stephen Huey]

Hey, guess what...I got it!

It was a problem in my manifest.

The Class-Path line needed to have a newline after it--the last line in the manifest has to have a newline marker at the end. :roll:

Oh well, at least it works!