Question

I want spring to serve certain files from the /tmp... directory, the specific directory isn’t determined until shortly after the server starts so using <mvc:resources location="/images/**" mapping="/absolute/path/to/image/dir"/> won’t seemingly work.

Answer 1

As Dave Newton noted – stream them from a controller. A very basic implementation:

@RequestMapping("/static/temp/{path}")
public void getResource(@PathVariable path, OutputStream os) {
     //TODO proper IO management
     InputStream is = new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream("/temp/" + path));
     IOUtils.copy(is, os);
}