Yeah, that’s what’s doing it. I would have thought the exclude would prevent ‘.gradle’ from being considered during up-to-date checking, but maybe there is something odd going on. In any event, the way you are doing it is a bit of an anti-pattern - moving your web content to a sub directory is the right move. The conventional location is ‘src/main/webapp’. If you move it there, then you probably wouldn’t have to do any configuration on the war task at all.