Adding a property file in the shared folder in tomcat 8 and using it in a Spring MVC web application

Question

I have a Java Spring MVC web application. I was using an application.properties file to set a few properties value. Now I am trying to get the properties independent of the war file. I have created a new folder shared/classes under tomcat as shown here.

In the catalina.properties file I have added shared.loader=${catalina.base}/shared/classes.

In my root-context.xml file, I added

<context:property-placeholder location="file:${catalina.base}/shared/classes/application.properties"/>

But I am getting the following error:

ERROR o.s.web.context.ContextLoader - Context initialization failed
org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanInitializationException: Could not load properties; nested exception is java.io.FileNotFoundException: E:\projects\smartwcm\workspace-20163101-eclipse-wp\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.wst.server.core\tmp0\shared\classes\application.properties (The system cannot find the path specified)

How can I fix this issue?

Answer 1

This is probably one of the limitations of the Servers folder created by eclipe. Where it actually places the contents of this folder is in

.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.wst.server.core/tmp0/conf

I've tried this locally and eclipse doesn't seem to publish any folder I create. And eclipse is very specific in naming the folder Tomcat v8.0 Server at localhost-config. This may also imply that property and configuration files are the only accepted system files. I can make everything work very well just by putting an application.properties file at the same level as for example catalina.properties. Then I publish with eclipse and then when I look at the temporary folder, the application file is there. Anyways there doesn't seem to be a specific reason to have your file in shared/classes. After all, as far as I can tell, they are properties to be shared in the server, so I would say their rightfull place is in the config folder.

Answer 2

Check out this answear. Maybe it will help

Where to place and how to read configuration resource files in servlet based application?