After rebuilding my Eclipse environment I had the need to refactor one of my web projects. Once I refactored it using the usual Eclipse method (right-click on the project –> Refactor –> Rename) I wasn’t able to start the project on my web server. The error message I got was

This selection is not within a valid module

Here are the steps to resolve this issue:

Step 1: Select the “Servers” tab in Eclipse

Step 2: Right-click on your server and select “Delete”

Step 3: If prompted, make sure all options are checked (“Delete unused server configuration(s)”, “Delete running server(s)”, and “Stop server(s) before deleting”) and click OK

Step 4: Close Eclipse

Step 5: Go into your project’s .settings directory and edit the org.eclipse.wst.common.component file

Step 6: Change the following values to the name of your refactored project:

wb-module deploy-name
property name="context-root" value

Step 7: Restart Eclipse and re-run your project

Now your project should deploy to your servlet container properly. Any time you refactor a web project in Eclipse you may need to do this so keep these instructions around if you think you’ll need to do it often.