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

Question

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?

Solution

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");

Comments

[David J. Liszewski]

Also asked and answered on SO stackoverflow.com/questions/3160343/…