Is it bad practice to include properties/configuaration files within jars?

Question

For example:

MyApp is a web app that contains a properties file (server.properties) that describes config data (e.g. server names) for the app. In the development phase

Answer 1

If you are using Spring then you can make use of the property placeholder to do the work.

You can specify a resource on the filesystem and also on the classpath, Spring will first try and resolve all of the properties from the filesystem and then fallback to the classpath. By specifying the "ignore-resource-not-found" attribute as "true" it will prevent Spring from throwing an exception if the file isn't present on the filesystem and allow it to resolve the properties from the classpath instead.

Using this combination also allows you to split the properties over two files, for example you might never want to specify passwords in the file on the classpath and expect them to be specified externally on the filesystem. Any properties missing from the filesystem will be resolved from the classpath.

In a folder containing:

application.jar
config.properties

You should be able to use:

java -jar application.jar

This is a sample config.properties for reference:

# This file contains properties that are used to configure the application
database.url=127.0.0.1
database.port=3306
database.user=root
database.pass=p4ssw0rd