maven war plugin does not forget about old files and dependencies and creates a war that contains removed files and dependencies

Question

Hello I'm having a weird problem about war creation.

I use maven-war-plugin (tried with 3.1.0, 3.2.0, and 2.6). When I run war:war (or mvn clean package, or similars) the war is created but I noticed that it is like it always packages all the files and dependencies it encountered in the history of the project. I noticed this because the war file is always getting bigger and by opening it I see there are a lot of dependencies that I declared on the pom but now they are removed, and most importantly there are classes I deleted from the project! I even tried to start a new project and the result does not change.

I guess I'm using this badly... Is there something I should do to let him "forget" about the history and force it to consider the project "as it is" when creating a war?

Thanks for the help!

PS:

• I always clean and compile before running war:war;
• I work with IntelliJ IDEA Community 2017.3
• using jdk 1.7 because of technical constraints.

Just for completeness, there is my pom.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>

    <groupId>sduca-consumer-listener</groupId>
    <artifactId>sduca-consumer-listener</artifactId>
    <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <packaging>war</packaging>

    <properties>
        <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
    </properties>

    <build>
        <sourceDirectory>src/main/java</sourceDirectory>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>3.6.0</version>
                <configuration>
                    <source>1.7</source>
                    <target>1.7</target>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>3.2.0</version>
                <configuration>
                    <webappDirectory>/sduca</webappDirectory>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>
    <dependencies>
        <!-- Using Spring 4 because of jdk 1.7 -->
        <!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.springframework/spring-webmvc -->
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-webmvc</artifactId>
            <version>4.3.18.RELEASE</version>
        </dependency>
        <!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/log4j/log4j -->
        <dependency>
            <groupId>log4j</groupId>
            <artifactId>log4j</artifactId>
            <version>1.2.17</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
            <artifactId>javax.servlet-api</artifactId>
            <version>3.1.0</version>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</project>

EDIT1: I tried to change versions of maven-war-plugin, maven-compiler-plugin, and Maven itself, but nothing changes.

EDIT2: I tried changing the output directory, no changes. I tried to change version of the dependencies and as "expected" now the war includes both versions, becoming bigger and bigger...

EDIT3: I reinstalled IntelliJ IDEA, upgrading to the latest version. Nothing changes, it has only reset the content of the package, but it still "keep track" of the content and dependencies and still includes removed stuff on the package when creating a new one.

EDIT4: I've started using mvn clean compile war:war instead of mvn clean package and at first things started working, but then the problem of the existing old files returned. However, I find out that if I manually remove the exceding resources and *.class from the war it looks it works (at least it's deployed).

Answer 1

It's just a trick worked for me many times,

Backup your dependencies from pom.xml and delete it. Do a clean build, it will show errors in all Java classes. Also delete the previous war.

Now, replace those backed up dependencies and clean build the webapp again. All errors will be disappeared and war file will be as expected.