I you are using Netbeans to develop a maven based (multi-module) (web) application you may have encountered this problem: The resources are not copied when re-running the application. The easy option: Build the project always before running it.

This is slow and just feels wrong. Netbeans lets you customize the life-cycle of your project, so you can hook all maven executions you like, especially the ‚resources‘ build step.

Open project properties, select ‚Actions‘ and add ‚resources:resources‘ to the front of the ‚execute Goals‘ field:

resources-run

You can add your own custom action as well, in case you want to trigger a specific step independently of the overall project lifecycle, for example the ‚resources:resources‘ goal:

resources