Ubuntu – Where to write files form a web application running on Tomcat on Ubuntu

javatomcatUbuntuubuntu-10.04web-applications

I have a Java web application (myapp.war) which I want do deploy to Tomcat, which is provided by Ubuntu (package tomcat6). This works by placing myapp.jar to the webapps direcotry. This works.

Now, my application has to store some data to local files. My idea was to write to the users home direcotry or to the current work direcotry. But on Ubuntu 10.04 the user is tomcat6, its home is /usr/lib/tomcat6/ and the current work directory is /var/lib/tomcat6/. And both belong to root. Therefore writing is impossible.

So where should a web application store its files?

Best Answer

I found the solution on Launchpad. /var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/ is writable. This means, that the following works:

File myFile = new File("webapps/myfile.txt");

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Tomcat does not use the CLASSPATH in the webapp's classloader. You can add paths and files to the common.loader line in conf/catalina.properties. The classloader should have found the class when the jar was in WEB-INF/lib. I can't explain why it hasn't. If you are using 5.5, you can place the jar in common/lib or lib/ if you're using tomcat6. This path is loaded by a higher level classloader and should be picked up first.

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Okay, I got something that works.

I edited the /etc/tomcat6/policy.d/01system.policy and added at the bottom:

// Grant WebApps All Permission
grant codeBase "file:/var/lib/tomcat6/webapps/-" {
    permission java.security.AllPermission;
};

This works now, but not sure if its the right thing to do.

Best Answer

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