Why are manifest class path entries not found on WebSphere Liberty Profile startup?

Question

When starting my application with WebSphere Liberty Profile (release 2013.11.0.0 - 8.5.5.Next Alpha with extended content) there are a lot of warnings showing up:

W SRVE9967W: The manifest class path dhbcore.jar can not be found in jar file wsjar:file:[blablabla] or its parent.
W SRVE9967W: The manifest class path jms.jar can not be found in jar file wsjar:file:[blablabla] or its parent.
W SRVE9967W: The manifest class path com.ibm.mq.jmqi.jar can not be found in jar file wsjar:file:[blablabla] or its parent.
W SRVE9967W: The manifest class path dhbcore.jar can not be found in jar file wsjar:file:[blablabla] or its parent.
W SRVE9967W: The manifest class path rmm.jar can not be found in jar file wsjar:file:[blablabla] or its parent.
W SRVE9967W: The manifest class path jndi.jar can not be found in jar file wsjar:file:[blablabla] or its parent.
W SRVE9967W: The manifest class path ldap.jar can not be found in jar file wsjar:file:[blablabla] or its parent.
W SRVE9967W: The manifest class path fscontext.jar can not be found in jar wsjar:file:[blablabla] or its parent.
W SRVE9967W: The manifest class path providerutil.jar can not be found in jar file wsjar:file:[blablabla] or its parent.
W SRVE9967W: The manifest class path jta.jar can not be found in jar file wsjar:file:[blablabla] or its parent.
W SRVE9967W: The manifest class path com.ibm.mq.ese.jar can not be found in jar wsjar:file:[blablabla] or its parent.

I tried to fix that with server start --clean as stated in this forum thread but it did not help. There's a similar question here on Stackoverflow but before opening a PMR at IBM as suggested maybe someone has experienced this issue as well and solved it already.

Answer 1

These warnings are saying that the JAR on the right (the one in wsjar:file:...) has a META-INF/MANIFEST.MF file with a Class-Path attribute that refers to the JARs on the left (e.g., dhbcore.jar), but those JARs don't actually exist.

This warning is indicative an application packaging issue, not something that can be resolved by changing configuration, restarting the server, etc. It is trying to help you avoid common causes of class loading problems: incorrectly formatting Class-Path attribute and misspelled JAR names.

Edit: As of 8.5.5.4, the <logging hideMessage="SRVE9967W"> configuration can be used to remove these messages after they have been reviewed. Be sure to temporarily remove the hiding when adding new applications (or debugging application classpath problems). See the Logging and Trace topic in the Knowledge Center.