Packaging all files into a single executable .jar

[ichwar]

Ok, my problem is simply this. When I write even a simple program, netbeans gives me an executable .jar file along with another folder containing a couple more .jar files. Is there any way for me to package all these files/folders into on .jar file that will still run just by being double clicked?

Thanks.

[Eranga]

I hope those addition jar files are layouts, in lib folder is it? Actually in that what i'm doing is build another jar file including that lib folder in my final jar. Most of the time I use the same folder structure in distribution.

[quad64bit]

Yes, there is a way to do it. I used to add a couple lines to netbean's build script which did this automatically, sadly it no longer works and I have yet to find out exactly why. Prior to netbeans 6.5.x, you could add the following:

<target name="-post-jar">
	       <jar update="true" destfile="${dist.jar}">
	        	<zipfileset src="${libs.swing-layout.classpath}"/>
	        </jar>
</target>

to Netbeans/harness/build.xml

When this started failing, I went back to a bash shell script I wrote ages ago, which I have included below. Feel free to modify it (you'll have to unless you keep all your stuff in exactly the same folders I do).

#!/bin/sh

cd ~/Programming/NetBeansProjects/
echo "Enter Project name"
read PROJ
echo "Enter Package Name"
read PKG
echo "Enter Main class name"
read MAIN

cd $PROJ/dist

rm -r /tmp/rejar/
mkdir /tmp/rejar/
cp -r * /tmp/rejar/
cd /tmp/rejar/
mv lib/swing-layout-1.0.3.jar lib/swing.zip
unzip lib/swing.zip 
rm -r lib
rm -r META-INF
mv $PROJ".jar" wg.zip
unzip wg.zip
echo "Main-Class: "$PKG"."$MAIN > META-INF/MANIFEST.MF
rm README.TXT
rm wg.zip
jar -cmf META-INF/MANIFEST.MF $PROJ".jar" *
mv $PROJ".jar" ~/Desktop/
rm -r /tmp/rejar
echo "Re-Jar'ing is complete, new .jar is on Desktop."

You can however do the steps manually -- all the jar tools are included with the JDK, you can type them into the command line one by one.

[Eranga]

I agreed, as far as I know that option didn't workout in NetBeans 6.5. So what we can do is keep the same structure in distribution or build a single jar file manually.

[joshuaborn]

I stumbled on this thread when googling the same problem. Here are the custom Ant targets I use for this:

    <target name="-unjar-and-copy-lib-jars">
        <unjar dest="${build.classes.dir}">
            <fileset dir="lib">
                <include name="**/*.jar"/>
            </fileset>
            <patternset>
                <exclude name="META-INF/**"/>
                <exclude name="/*"/>
            </patternset>
        </unjar>
    </target>

    <target depends="init,compile,-pre-pre-jar,-pre-jar,-unjar-and-copy-lib-jars" name="fat-jar">
        <property location="${build.classes.dir}" name="build.classes.dir.resolved"/>
        <jar destfile="${dist.jar}">
            <fileset dir="${build.classes.dir}"/>
            <manifest>
                <attribute name="Main-Class" value="${main.class}"/>
            </manifest>
        </jar>
        <echo>To run this application from the command line without Ant, try:</echo>
        <property location="${dist.jar}" name="dist.jar.resolved"/>
        <echo>java -jar "${dist.jar.resolved}"</echo>
    </target>

    <target depends="clean,fat-jar" name="clean-and-fat-jar"/>

For more info, see my blog post on the matter.

[quad64bit]

Thanks for the post! This is a problem I had ages ago too - hence my script. I've found that in the current versions (java 1.6 and NetBeans 6.8) the separate swing layout libraries are no longer included in the build and that the layout that was used (was it groupLayout?) is now included in the JDK for 1.6. However, unless I rebuild my old gui projects from scratch, netbeans continues to use the old separate swing layout library. Thanks for the post!

I was really irritated when my modifications to the ant build script just stopped working after 6.5 and honestly don't know anything about writing ant build scripts from scratch (or modifying them to any great degree!).