Java webapp - where to put application-generated files? - java

I'm working on a Java web application that needs to store uploaded files in one directory, and an embedded Neo4j database in another directory. I'm deploying the warfile to Tomcat to serve the application, and the application needs to be runnable under Tomcat in either Linux or Windows.
Where exactly should I be putting these two directories on the host system's filesystem?
I'm confused since I'm accustomed to storing information in databases specified via a URL, etc. Thanks for the help.

Is there a chance webapp have two or more instances running at the same time, say in a same Tomcat with two /path names?
Java has system property user.home you could always create a subfolder on it. Current user is the one running Tomcat server. Print properties to sysout for debug purpose.
Reading a webapp name at runtime you can use servletContext.getRealPath("/") function. You get a filename path to $tomcat/webapps/mywebapp and use last folder entry. Define ServletContextListener in web.xml so you can read webapp name at startup.
Use naming convention ${user.home}/tomcat/${webappname}/ and store any file you please.
Or define a webapp context-param variable in web.xml file and let deployer create an appropriate folder.
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/environment/sysprop.html
http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/6/api/javax/servlet/ServletContextListener.html
http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/6/api/javax/servlet/ServletContext.html#getInitParameter%28java.lang.String%29

Related

Wildfly Deployment going to temp folder

I am facing a little strange issue while deploying web service to WAR file.
If I deploy the application via Netbeans IDE it is going under \standalone\deployments directory.
However, if I deploy the war file from Admin Console it is always getting deployed at \standalone\tmp directory.
Please guide on this issue. The deployment should go under \standalone\deployments directory only.
The deployment should go under \standalone\deployments directory only
You are quite not right.
It is not an issue. It is what it is.
standalone/deployment folder stand there only for "hot-deployment" functionality available only with standalone mode.
So, Netbeans uses it. You can do the same just by saving EAR or WAR into standalone/deployment and server will pick it. (default scan interval is 5 sec.)
but Admin console or CLI is only (and standard) way to deploy application on domain. In domain mode deployment folder is not in use and there is no deployment scanner.
Then when you use console it goes common way - deploys as on domain regardless is it domain or standalone server.
Updated / follow-up:
In general it is better to keep .properties file(s) out of deployment, in separate location. It is main idea behind them - to be able to change properties without application rebuilding and redeploying. Usually properties are different in different environments (DEV/UAT/PROD)
So there are 2 most popular solutions:
store properties in different location add that location to class path and access them through ClassLoader.getResourceAsStream() mechanism
store properties in different location, pass that location through system (or -D) variable and access them as file. for JBoss you can place your .properties under configuration directory. there is already JBoss variable. Kind of jboss.config.dir (or such, you can find it in Admin console, I do not have JBoss right now).
But of course sometime it still needed to access resources inside WAR/EAR - in that situation it is pretty much the same as first solution above.
Just be sure your .properties file(s) are accessible through to ClassLoader (in class path) and use them from ClassLoader.getResourceAsStream (or if you use Spring point it as "classpath:" not as "file:".

Logging in web application deployed as WAR

I am coding a Java web web application packaged as war and I would like to add logging and specify the log folder to write log files to (using configuration file, e.g. logback.xml)
Obviously, I would not like to configure the absolute path of the folder. Now I wonder how to configure the log folder in war. What are the best practices and recommended approaches to this?
We use to use relative paths in logback.xml but changed to using an env property. When the path was relative we could never tell the customer exactly where the log file was due to different Java EE server implementations. Using an absolute path with an env variable made it easier. For example
<file>${user.dir}/logs/my_web_app.log</file>

Locating created file with Java EE and Tomcat

I have created a dynamic web project, and use Apache Tomcat as a server.
In my servlet I'm creating a text file and want to reuse that in a JSP. However they are by default created in the installation folder of Eclipse when I do something as simple as the following:
File f = new file("test.txt").
I don't know why this happens. Is there a way to create the file in the WebContent directory as I want to make that file available for download in my JSP.
Java has a concept of the "current directory". When you start an application via Eclipse, this may indeed point to your installation directory. If you don't specify any path, a file will be created in this current directory. Hence the reason why your test.txt ends up there.
The WebContent directory is a something that is specific to Eclipse. Your code should not depend on putting anything there. You only start your application via Eclipse when you're developing it, not when you're deploying it to a live server.
The content of this directory will become the root of your .war, which is a well known location independent of how you start & deploy you app, BUT you still cannot depend on writing anything to this location at run-time. You might deploy your application as a packaged .war (likely for live deployments) or you may deploy your application unpackaged but then your application server may simply not pick up any changes done at run-time.
What you can do if you are sure your application only runs on a single server is writing the files to a well known location on your file system, such as /tmp, or /var/yourapp/files, etc. The code serving up those files can then pick them up from that location.
If you want to play it 100% safe according to the Java EE rules, you'd store your files on something like an FTP server that has a configurable address. Technically your war could be shipped between nodes on a cluster and requests could end up going to different machines, so depending on a local filesystem wouldn't work then.
Executing this statement this.getServletContext().getRealPath (""), you'll obtain the path where Tomcat WebServer is pointing at at runtime. You could add a folder "MyFolder" and call this statement:
new File(this.getServletContext().getRealPath ("") + "/MyFolder/test.txt");
Anyway, the default path looks something like:
...\workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.wst.server.core\tmp0\wtpwebapps\<NameOfYourProject>
Note that when you create a new file, it won't appear in your immediate workspace (check the .metadata path), unless you change the runtime location tomcat should point at.

Java - Relative path of a file in a java web application

I want to read a file from a java web application. I don't want to give the absolute path of the file. I just want to put the file in some directory of my web application.
Or
It can be placed along with .war file (packaged web application).
What relative path to give for the file. I tried ./filename.csv but it didn't work.
========Updated========
I will deliver a WAR file (packaged web application) to my client. This web application will read a file (lets say SuppliedFile.csv) which will be copied to the server by the client. So I need a mechanism (that will work irrespective of whether the application server will unpak the WAR or not) so that web application can read that file.
Note:
I am not using the SuppliedFile.csv in a servlet... I am using it in a plain Java class...
Do you really need to load it from a file? If you place it along your classes (in WEB-INF/classes) you can get an InputStream to it using the class loader:
InputStream csv =
SomeClassInTheSamePackage.class.getResourceAsStream("filename.csv");
You may be able to simply access a pre-arranged file path on the system. This is preferable since files added to the webapp directory might be lost or the webapp may not be unpacked depending on system configuration.
In our server, we define a system property set in the App Server's JVM which points to the "home directory" for our app's external data. Of course this requires modification of the App Server's configuration (-DAPP_HOME=... added to JVM_OPTS at startup), we do it mainly to ease testing of code run outside the context of an App Server.
You could just as easily retrieve a path from the servlet config:
<web-app>
<context-param>
<param-name>MyAppHome</param-name>
<param-value>/usr/share/myapp</param-value>
</context-param>
...
</web-app>
Then retrieve this path and use it as the base path to read the file supplied by the client.
public class MyAppConfig implements ServletContextListener {
// NOTE: static references are not a great idea, shown here for simplicity
static File appHome;
static File customerDataFile;
public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent e) {
appHome = new File(e.getServletContext().getInitParameter("MyAppHome"));
File customerDataFile = new File(appHome, "SuppliedFile.csv");
}
}
class DataProcessor {
public void processData() {
File dataFile = MyAppConfig.customerDataFile;
// ...
}
}
As I mentioned the most likely problem you'll encounter is security restrictions. Nothing guarantees webapps can ready any files above their webapp root. But there are generally simple methods for granting exceptions for specific paths to specific webapps.
Regardless of the code in which you then need to access this file, since you are running within a web application you are guaranteed this is initialized first, and can stash it's value somewhere convenient for the rest of your code to refer to, as in my example or better yet, just simply pass the path as a paramete to the code which needs it.
If you have a path for that file in the web server, you can get the real path in the server's file system using ServletContext.getRealPath(). Note that it is not guaranteed to work in every container (as a container is not required to unpack the WAR file and store the content in the file system - most do though). And I guess it won't work with files in /WEB-INF, as they don't have a virtual path.
The alternative would be to use ServletContext.getResource() which returns a URI. This URI may be a 'file:' URL, but there's no guarantee for that.
Many popular Java webapps, including Jenkins and Nexus, use this mechanism:
Optionally, check a servlet context-param / init-param. This allows configuring multiple webapp instances per servlet container, using context.xml which can be done by modifying the WAR or by changing server settings (in case of Tomcat).
Check an environment variable (using System.getenv), if it is set, then use that folder as your application data folder. e.g. Jenkins uses JENKINS_HOME and Nexus uses PLEXUS_NEXUS_WORK. This allows flexible configuration without any changes to WAR.
Otherwise, use a subfolder inside user's home folder, e.g. $HOME/.yourapp. In Java code this will be:
final File appFolder = new File(System.getProperty("user.home"), ".yourapp");
The alternative would be to use ServletContext.getResource() which returns a URI. This URI
may be a 'file:' URL, but there's no guarantee for that.
You don't need it to be a file:... URL. You just need it to be a URL that your JVM can
read--and it will be.
there is another way,
if you are using a container like Tomcat :
String textPath = "http://localhost:8080/NameOfWebapp/resources/images/file.txt";

Where will WebLogic look for files by default?

I have a web application deployed in WebLogic. In one of my java file, I tried to read PleaseNote.txt as following:
File file = new File("PleaseNote.txt");
Now WebLogic is taking PleaseNote.txt from its domain directory.My question is:
Why it is domain directory? Why not the directory where my java file which has the above line of code is in?
Is there any configuration which I am not aware of , but did unknowingly, for WebLogic to look in its domain directory?
What are the implications / side effects of using above line of code in production?
Any WeLogic experts, please respond.
Thank you
Regards
Chaitanya
Reading a file using that way makes your application less portable and not very robust: if you deploy your application on another application server, you'll have to find out where to put that PleaseNote.txt file again or the code will break.
This breaks the WORA (Write Once, Run Anywhere) principle and I'd consider this as a bad
practice.
So, I'd rather put this file in the classpath and use ClassLoader#getResourceAsStream(String name) to read it.
It is domain directory because it's corresponds to value of user.dir system variable, the place where java reads/writes files if path not explicitly set.
Why domain directory corresponds to user.dir ? Because you start Weblogic server here.
Regards
Alexander Rozhkov
when using new File(..) java looks for the file in the directory from where java.exe is started. In case of an weblogic domain, this is ofcourse the domain directory. This is default java behaviour.
When you want to load a file that is in de same directory as the class-file you are loading from, use ClassLoad.getResourcesAsStream(). If you want to load a resource from the classpath use the same method, but prefix your file with "/".

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