Where in maven project's path should I put configuration files that are not considered resources

I have a simple java maven project. One of my classes when executing needs to load an xml configuration file from the classpath. I don't want to package such xml file when producing the jar but I want to include a default xml file in a zip assembly under a conf subfolder and I also want this default xml to be available in the unit tests to test against it.

As I see it there are 2 possible places of this default xml:

src/main/resources/conf/default.xml
src/main/conf/default.xml

Both solutions demand special pom actions:

In solution 1, I get the auto copy to target folder during build which means it is available in testing but I also get it in the produced jar which i don't want.
In solution 2, I get the jar as I want it(free of the xml) but I manually have to copy the xml to the target folder to be available for testing. (I don't want to add src's subfolders in test classpath. I think it is bad practice).

Question: what is the best solution of the two?
- If the correct is 2, what is the best way to copy it to target folder?
- Is there any other solution better and more common than those two?

(I also read Where should I put application configuration files for a Maven project? but I would like to know the most "correct solution" from the "convention over configuration" point of view and this link provides some configuration type solutions but not any convention oriented. Maybe there isn't one but I ask anyway. Also the solutions provided include AntRun plugin and appAssembler plugin and I wonder if I could do it with out them.)

Solution

The question is what is the best solution of the two? If the correct is 2, what is the best way to copy it to target folder? Is there any other solution better and more common than those two?

Since you want that file to be copied to the target/classes folder, it has somehow to be considered as a resource (so either put in under src/main/resources or declare src/main/conf as resource directory). And if you don't want it in the final jar, configure the Maven JAR Plugin to exclude it:

<project>
  ...
  <build>
    <plugins>
      ...
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-jar-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.3.1</version>
        <configuration>
          <excludes>
            <exclude>**/conf/*</exclude>
          </excludes>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
      ...
    </plugins>
  </build>
  ...
</project>

For the assembly part, assembly descriptors are pretty flexible so it should be possible to achieve what you want regardless of the choice. I'd suggest using the easiest setup though.