Now that Struts 2.1.2 is officially out you may want to upgrade. I’ve found the upgrading instructions at the Struts wiki to be extremely useful, and pretty much you’ll need to read the whole thing.

Two things that I’ve contributed to the wiki:

Ensure no dependencies in the freemarker groupId are used as the latest version used by Struts is now under the org.freeemarker groupId and you’ll get classpath conflicts if you added a freemarker dependency.

In the unit tests you may get a NullPointerException as ActionContext.getContext() does not create a context on demand, I think there are better alternatives to avoid the direct use of getContext, but this snippet will fix the problem.

ConfigurationManager configurationManager = new ConfigurationManager();
configurationManager.addContainerProvider(new XWorkConfigurationProvider());
Configuration config = configurationManager.getConfiguration();
Container container = config.getContainer();

ValueStack stack = container.getInstance(ValueStackFactory.class).createValueStack();
stack.getContext().put(ActionContext.CONTAINER, container);
ActionContext.setContext(new ActionContext(stack.getContext()));

assertNotNull(ActionContext.getContext());