webxml attribute is required with Servlet 3.0
By default maven-war-plugin will fail if it can’t find web.xml, see here. If you are creating Maven project using latest archetype, you will get this parameter set to false: <build> <plugins> <plugin> <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId> <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId> <configuration> <failOnMissingWebXml>false</failOnMissingWebXml> </configuration> </plugin> </plugins> </build> If you want to use web.xml instead of annotations, just create WEB-INF/web.xml and define servlet … Read more