Best Practices

Avoid absolute paths

The stack builds and runs the application within development and deployment containers where the project root directory is subject to change. As a result, absolute paths should be avoided within the application, including within the pom.xml and server config. Instead, relative paths and variables should be used whenever possible to reference directories relative to the project root.

For example, Maven's built-in ${project.build.directory} variable can be used to reference the target/ directory of the app. Likewise, Open Liberty's ${server.config.dir} variable can be used to reference the server config directory.