Spring Boot war packaging: Execution with additional classpath

Question

I would like to package my Spring Boot application as a war package in order to

• deploy on existing tomcat
• running standalone with java -jar application.war

with the same artifact. To achieve this I set the scope of spring-boot-starter-tomcat to provided so these dependencies are located in folder lib-provided .

I don't want to include the Database driver in the artifact. When running on existing tomcat I just add the database driver (as jar) to its lib folder.

Now my question: How can I add the additional classpath (eg lib/* ) to the java -jar application.war command? Traditional approaches (like java -cp lib/* -jar application.war ) did not work.

Answer 1

Found out that Spring Boot uses a WarLauncher to run executable war files. So

 java -cp drivers/*:application.war org.springframework.boot.loader.WarLauncher

is a working commandline command to add additional jar files to the classpath without modifying or unpacking the war file.