The UIMA documentAnalyzer can also be used from the command line. target/classes and everything that is in WERTi/WEB-INF/lib *have* to be in the classpath. From WERTi's root, you can issue: for i in target/WERTi/WEB-INF/lib/*jar; do CLASSPATH=$i:$CLASSPATH; done; export CLASSPATH=target/classes:$CLASSPATH to update your classpath. The documentAnalyzer is then run via the following shell command (adding log4j properties too, since you probably want to have logging output:) java -Dwerti.serverProperties=test.properties \ -Dlog4j.configuration=test-log4j.properties \ org.apache.uima.tools.docanalyzer.DocumentAnalyzer test.properties can be substituted for another properties file that defines different defaults for the relevant runtime variables.