Problem: Eclipse not building a Maven project automatically before deploying it

Yesterday I spent over an hour trying to figure out why my webapp was not picking up my Spring annotations properly. After that dreadful 1h+, I found out that Eclipse was not building my webapp automatically before deploying it to the application server. This was the point at which I had to get up, leave the office and go to the gym, otherwise my laptop would now be reduced to its most elementary components.

Today I found out why. I created this project manually instead of using mvn archetype:generate because I didn’t want to use an archetype (I like to have control over the stuff that’s placed in my projects and I have no appreciation for the placeholders the generator creates).

When I created the pom.xml manually, I gave the project the type pom, because I meant to create several submodules inside it. I configured the project to be a Maven project at this time (right-click on the project > Configure > Convert to Maven Project).

Later I decided I wouldn’t be adding submodules for now, instead having this single project generate a WAR file. I changed the POM file to have the type war. Eclipse immediately detected the web.xml file and allowed me to deploy the project to a server. Yet, apparently, it did not know the project has to be built before, or it didn’t know how.

To fix it, make sure you update the Maven project in Eclipse (right-click on the project > Maven > Update project).

I still think it should have picked it up automatically…