Including external jar in Tomcat ClassPath

Question

In Tomcat I want to use a jar inside a web application. The jar file will exist outside of the Tomcat directory.

To include the jar file in tomcat classpath, I modified the TomcatHome/conf/catalina.properties to include the absolute path of my jar file like,

shared.loader=D:\jaa\MyJarFile.jar

as per the suggestion given in link,

http://www.mulesoft.com/tomcat-classpath

But it throws the error,

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError

I have also tried ,

shared.loader=D:\jaa\*.jar

shared.loader=file:\\D:\jaa\MyJarFile.jar

None of them seem to work :(

If I try placing the jar inside tomcat/lib it seem to work. But I am not allowed to do that.

Please help me out with this issue as I have implementation the next week..

Answer 1

I figured myself how to add the classpath for tomcat. Instead of editing catalina.properties, just create a "setenv.sh" in the Tomcat Bin directory with the classpath,

Example,

CLASSPATH=D:\jaa\MyJarFile.jar

I just checked the catalina.sh in Tomcat/bin and these classpath variable will be set while setting the bootstrap as the classpath.