ClassNotFoundException with Netbeans and H2 Database - database

Question

So I followed the tutorial on the H2 Documentation page and used the "Connecting to a Database using JDBC" method of connecting to the database. I First added the h2-*.jar file to the Lib Folder (through Netbeans) and used the following to make the connection to my database I previously created.
Class.forName("org.h2.Driver");
connection = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:h2:~/" + DatabaseName);
This turned out to work in the IDE environment, however when I attempted to run the application directly from the jar executable I get the following error:
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.h2.Driver ...
this error occurs at the Class.forName() class loader. So I did a little looking around and found that this was a prominent problem. One solution people use was to extract the class Loader from the current Thread as so:
Thread t = Thread.currentThread();
ClassLoader cl = t.getContextClassLoader();
cl.getClass().getClassLoader();
Class toRun = cl.loadClass("org.h2.Driver");
Unfortunately this seems to still result in the same error, so i'm wondering what i'm doing wrong. Should I be doing something to make sure the Driver is in the class path? I have no I idea how if that's the case.
Thanks!

Answer 1

You need to add the h2-*.jar file to the classpath when running the application, for example using
java -cp h2*.jar -jar yourApp.jar