Maven Error: Could not find or load main class

Question

I'm using a Java Maven program and I don't know what to enter as the <mainClass>. I've tried all kinds of things based off of numerous stackoverflow questions, but they are not solving the error.

Each time it says:

Maven Error: Could not find or load main class ...

I have this written inside my pom.xml (minus the ???)

  <build>
  ...
  <plugins>
  ...
    <plugin>
        <artifactId>maven-assembly-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.5.3</version>
        <configuration>
            <descriptors>
                <descriptor>src/main/assembly/jar-with-dependencies.xml</descriptor>
            </descriptors>
            <archive>
                <manifest>
                    <mainClass> ??? </mainClass>
                </manifest>
            </archive>
        </configuration>
        <executions>
            <execution>
            <id>make-assembly</id>
            <phase>package</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>single</goal>
            </goals>
            </execution>
        </executions>
    </plugin>
  ...
  </plugins>
  ...
  </build>

How do I fix these errors?

Answer 1

I got this error using Maven, and I discovered the solution.

Error: Could not find or load main class com.mycompany.testapifactory.Main

I'm using java JDK version 1.7 on Linux, my pom.xml file was the default generated by Netbeans and I was using these commands to compile, which do work fine with a normal hello-world java application:

mvn clean compile
java -jar target/TestAPIFactory-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar com.mycompany.testapifactory.Main

What happened:

It turns out my problem was that my Main method was extending something Exotic like this:

public class Main extends SomeExoticLibraryClass{
    public static void main(String[] args){
        //...
    }
}

It was this extending of the main class that caused the above error.

TLDR solution:

Make sure your main class isn't extending any 3rd party classes. Refactor those out and away into their own classes. That error message is awful, and requires process of elimination to find out what to do.