Contrary to most of other configuration files, placing the struts.xml configuration file in the WEB-INF folder does not work. But you can place it, eg. in the root source folder of your application. I spent about two hours after cleaning/building my test project in Eclipse without realizing, that the struts.xml file was deleted from the source folder but still was available in the WEB-INF folder (where I kept a copy of the file).