How to install JDBC driver in Eclipse web project without facing java.lang.ClassNotFoundexception

As for every "3rd-party" library in flavor of a JAR file which is to be used by the webapp, just copy/drop the physical JAR file in webapp's /WEB-INF/lib. It will then be available in webapp's default classpath. Also, Eclipse is smart enough to notice that. No need to hassle with buildpath. However, make sure to remove all unnecessary references you added before, else it might collide.

An alternative is to install it in the server itself by dropping the physical JAR file in server's own /lib folder. This is required when you're using server-provided JDBC connection pool data source which in turn needs the MySQL JDBC driver.

See also:

• How to add JAR libraries to WAR project without facing java.lang.ClassNotFoundException? Classpath vs Build Path vs /WEB-INF/lib
• How should I connect to JDBC database / datasource in a servlet based application?
• Where do I have to place the JDBC driver for Tomcat's connection pool?
• JDBC CLASSPATH Not Working

Since you are running it in servlet, you need to have the jar accessible by the servlet container. You either include the connector as part of your application war or put it as part of the servlet container's extended library and datasource management stuff, if it has one. The second part is totally depend on the container that you have.

The others are right about making the driver JAR available to your servlet container. My comment was meant to suggest that you verify from the command line whether the driver itself is intact.

Rather than an empty main(), try something like this, adapted from the included documentation:

public class LoadDriver {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        Class.forName("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver");
    }
}

On my platform, I'd do this:

$ ls mysql-connector-java-5.1.12-bin.jar 
mysql-connector-java-5.1.12-bin.jar
$ javac LoadDriver.java 
$ java -cp mysql-connector-java-5.1.12-bin.jar:. LoadDriver

On your platform, you need to use ; as the path separator, as discussed here and here.