I know this is an old and apparently answered question, but unfortunately the links provided in the accepted answer didn’t give me the simple details I was looking for. For anyone also trying to understand how IntelliJ IDEA deploys your exploded war to JBoss without copying files to the deployments folder, here’s what I’ve found while deploying locally from IDEA 14 (EAP) to JBoss 7.1.1.Final:
- After you’ve created an “exploded war” artifact for your project (or it has automatically been created for you), IDEA will build your provided sources and place the output in the directory set in the artifact options (you can change this setting to place the output inside the deployments folder inside your jboss installation).
- IDEA will update your JBoss configuration file (/standalone/configuration/standalone.xml) and add a “deployment” node inside the deployments section. This entry simply defines a name, a runtime name and the exploded war root folder for your project, which will point to the output directory of your artifact set in IDEA.
- When JBoss is started (either manually or from your run/debug configuration in IDEA), it will automatically deploy your artifact. Be warned that if your files are in the output directory of your project and you clean it, JBoss will still try to find the directory, thus encountering errors in your next attempt to start it:
org.jboss.as.server.deployment.DeploymentUnitProcessingException: Failed to mount deployment content,Failed to process phase STRUCTURE of deploymentandjava.io.FileNotFoundExceptionto name a few.