java - Producing executable jar in NetBeans

Question

I'm using NetBeans 6.5 and for some reason it won't produce executable jar "out of the box".

I set my project to be the main project, defined main class in the project properties "run" menu and it works flawlessly when I press F6 to run it.

I looked at the manifest file and it indeed didn't define the main class there, and also omitted the library dependencies.

Am I missing something? Is there a way (other than manually altering the manifest file) to produce executable jar files?

EDIT: yes, I tried clean and rebuild and it produced the jar in the dist folder, still with the same manifest.mf

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Ant-Version: Apache Ant 1.7.1
Created-By: 10.0-b23 (Sun Microsystems Inc.)

Answer 1

I just had the same problem in NetBeans 7.2.1 with a Maven Java Application project. Modify the pom.xml file to include the maven assembly plugin with one tweak to myrho's answer (needs to reference the predefined descriptor "jar-with-dependencies"):

<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.4</version>
    <configuration>
        <descriptorRefs>
            <descriptorRef>jar-with-dependencies</descriptorRef>
        </descriptorRefs>
        <archive>
            <manifest>
                <mainClass>your.app.MainClass</mainClass>
            </manifest>
        </archive>
    </configuration>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>make-assembly</id>
            <phase>package</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>single</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

An alternate method is to build a Java Application project in NetBeans that doesn't use Maven. Select File -> Project Properties -> Build -> Packaging and check the "Copy Dependent Libraries" checkbox.