Question

Im trying to access the example/web folder (see below in the image) in a jsf managed bean but cant seem to find a way to do it

thx

Answer 1

If you want to get it as a File for some reason, then you need ExternalContext#getRealPath(). This converts a relative web path to an absolute disk file system. Since you need the web’s root folder, just pass in /:

String absoluteWebPath = externalContext.getRealPath("/");
File webRoot = new File(absoluteWebPath);
// ...

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Unrelated to the concrete problem, whatever functional requirement you’ve had in mind for which you thought that having an absolute local disk file system path to the web folder is the right solution, it has most definitely to be solved differently. And indeed, as per your comment on the other answer,

because Im trying to upload some file inside the folder and using the relative path

you’re going the wrong path. You should not store uploaded files in there if you intend to keep them longer than the webapp’s deployment lifetime. Whenever you redeploy the webapp (and on some server configs even when you restart the server), the uploaded files would get completely lost, simply because they are not contained as part of the original WAR file. Even more, some heavy server configs don’t expand the WAR on disk at all, but in memory instead, the getRealPath() would then always return null.

Rather store it in a fixed disk file system path outside the server’s deploy folder. Add that path in turn as a new server context or docroot, so that it’s accessible on a different (virtual) context path. Or homegrow a servlet which gets an InputStream of it from disk and writes it to OutputStream of the response. See also this related answer: Uploaded image only available after refreshing the page