How to get the absolute path of the executed jar?

Question

How do I get the location of the executed jar? I found a lot of solutions but none of them work for me. When I run them in my IDE everything is fine. As soon as I build a jar file and run it with java -jar myapp.jar the output is like /.../myapp.jar!/foo/bar

I will run the code in myapp.jar - not in any library.

Location of jar: /home/me/dev/myapp/myapp.jar
Expected output: /home/me/dev/myapp/

I don't want the working directory as I would get with System.getProperty("user.dir");

Why I want to do this:

I want to store and load a file beside the actual jar. Like

/home/me/bin/myapp/myapp.jar
/home/me/bin/myapp/license.key

I want to avoid storing the file into some generic folder like System.getProperty("user.home");. And I don't want to store the file within the jar file.

see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/320542/how-to-get-the-path-of-a-running-jar-file — flafoux, Sep 16 '15 at 13:56
@flafoux none of these solutions deliver my expected output. — boop, Sep 16 '15 at 14:00
The overall important question here is: Why do you need that info? Usually, it is not necessary to know the location of any JAR file. In fact, this question seems to be an [XY problem](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem). — Seelenvirtuose, Sep 16 '15 at 14:03
@Brettetete: do you package your required libraries into the executable jar? — wero, Sep 16 '15 at 14:22
@Brettete would it be an option to place the libraries in a subfolder (as for instance offered by the Eclipse Runnable Jar exporter)? — wero, Sep 16 '15 at 14:31

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 16 '15 at 14:37

0

java.nio.file.Paths.get(".").toAbsolutePath() will return absolute path to current directory.

answered Sep 16 '15 at 14:37

dsavickas

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I quote my question here: "I don't want the working directory" – boop Sep 16 '15 at 14:42
Try creating simple class which simply prints `Paths.get(".").toAbsolutePath()` to stdout and create jar file containing this class. Then move this jar file to different folders and run `java -jar test.jar`. I saw name of directory where jar file is located printed to stdout. I assumed this is what you want. – dsavickas Sep 16 '15 at 14:51
`cd /tmp && java -jar /home/me/myapp.jar` would result in `/tmp/` - not what I want. I want `/home/me/` – boop Sep 16 '15 at 14:56

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 16 '15 at 14:57

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I use something along these lines:

[YourClass].class.getProtectionDomain().getCodeSource().getLocation().getPath()

Regards

answered Sep 16 '15 at 14:57

Dragos.Cojocari

115
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Gives me the following result `file:/home/me/myapp/myapp.jar!/META-INF/classes!/` – boop Sep 16 '15 at 15:23
I'm getting file:/home/me/myapp/myapp.jar What JRE are you using and how did you pack the jar? – Dragos.Cojocari Sep 17 '15 at 12:58

How to get the absolute path of the executed jar?

2 Answers2