What defines the "war-ness" of my project?

Question

I'm running the goal: tomcat:deploy. There are no errors, but it's not deploying my project into tomcat. I noticed this message:

[INFO] Skipping non-war project

What defines the "war-ness" of my project? How do I make my Eclipse project a war project?

Here's my plugin setting:

    <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.maven</groupId>
        <artifactId>tomcat7-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.1</version>
    </plugin>

I have my structure like this:

src > main > java 
src > main > webapp > WEB-INF > web.xml

This one works with the maven:war plugin. I'm able to build a war with this structure.

My end objective is to do away with the war building part and be able to deploy my project to tomcat with one maven command.

Answer 1

Maybe you are missing the 'packaging' element in your pom.xml:

     <packaging>war</packaging>

If you don't include one, the default packaging is 'jar'.