Best practices to work with file paths in Java

Question

I m trying to load properties file to create a configuration. namely foo.properties.

What the best place to store this config file. Within the package where i will use initialize the using class? on the root level of the src?

Also, while accessing the files, i am using the location of the file in the file system: ie: c:\configs\foo.properties.

Is there a better practice for this? such as using the path relative to the project rather than the file system location? if yes, how can i reference the location of a property file within a project tree. such as:

src/
   /com.foo.bar
   /com.foo.car
   /com.foo.zar
   foo.properties

lets say i want to read the properties file to memory, how do i access this foo.properties without using the OS location/ or the location in the file system.

Answer 1

If you want keep something close to your current structure then you can just add a resources folder, like so:

src/
   /com.foo.bar
   /com.foo.car
   /com.foo.zar
resources
   /foo.properties

But I highly recommend following Maven directory structures, they really do give you a lot of flexibility:

src/
    /main
        /java
            /com.foo.bar
            /com.foo.car
            /com.foo.zar
        /resources
            /foo.properties

Regardless of what layout you go with I would recommend putting your resources in a folder structure matching one of your Java packages, that way you can easily load them as resources, avoiding your absolute vs relative file path conundrum. Something like this:

src/
    /resources/
       /com/foo/bar/foo.properties

And given a class com.foo.bar.MyClass you can do something like this:

InputStream is = MyClass. getResourceAsStream("com/foo/bar/foo.properties");