title: importing an eclipse project from file system, then running on server
body: <p>I am trying to do the spring security tutorial <a href="http://static.springsource.org/spring-security/site/tutorial.html" rel="nofollow"> at this link</a>.  </p>
  
  <p>In the section entitled <strong>"Running the Tutorial application without Spring Security"</strong>, I took the following steps (adjusted for differences between the current version and the version that was in use when the tutorial was written):  </p>
  
  <pre><code>1.) I downloaded the latest release of the Spring Security Distribution,   
  2.) found and unzipped a war file in the dist directory called spring-security-samples-tutorial-3.1.2.RELEASE.war  
  3.) Renamed the resulting folder spring-security-tutorial  
  4.) Created a general project in eclipse called spring-security-tutorial  
  5.) Imported all of the contents of the unzipped spring-security-samples-tutorial-3.1.2.RELEASE.war  
  6.) Right clicked on the project in eclipse and selected configure...convert to maven project  
  7.) Then right clicked on the project and clicked run as...  
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But there was no "run on server" option.  (I had chosen a general project instead of a Dynamic Web Project in hopes of preserving the file structure of the application to be imported)</p>
  
  <p>I then started to repeat the process, but creating a Dynamic Web Project instead of a general project, and eclipse wants me to select the "src folders on build path".  The file structure of the web application has 8 .class files in subfolders of WEB-INF, and I am not able to locate any .java files.  </p>
  
  <p>What steps can I take in order to download this and run it in eclipse on the server?  With the ability to edit the classes?  </p>
  
  <p>I have read that I can select a .class file in eclipse and it will open the bytecode in the editor, so I imagine I can convert the class files to java files easily enough.  But doing that within a general project triggers the error message that the class is not part of the classpath, so we need to get it in a working web project that can be run on the tomcat server from within eclipse first, I think.</p>