Specifying index path with Hibernate Search and Spring - spring

Question

I have problem setting the correct path for my index. It would be great if it was inside my spring application, since it would work even after I deploy my application to Cloudbees I guess.
This is my obejct that I trying to index:
#Entity
#Table(name="educations")
#Indexed(index="educations")
public class Education {
I have the following in servlet-context.xml:
<resources mapping="/resources/**" location="/resources/"/>
I specify the lucene index path like this:
Properties props = new Properties();
props.put("hibernate.search.default.indexBase", "resources/lucene/indexes");
entityManagerFactory.setJpaProperties(props);
Which doesnt give me any error but I cant find the folder either, which I dont understand. I tried searching for it.
I also tried:
props.put("hibernate.search.default.indexBase", "classpath:/lucene/indexes");
and
props.put("hibernate.search.default.indexBase", "/resources/lucene/indexes");
But still cant find the folder. However after a while of struggling with this I try to put it in my home directory. (which might give me problem later when deploying to the cloud):
props.put("hibernate.search.default.indexBase", "/lucene/indexes");
I getting the following
Cannot write into index directory: /lucene/indexes for index educations
So I assume its a permission error. I try the following in terminal (OSX):
sudo chmod -R u+rwX /lucene/indexes/
and
sudo chmod -R 755 /lucene/indexes/
But still the same error. Can someone spread some light on this?
Thank you!
Edit:
After some more investigation I am sure it is a problem of permissions. If I specify the full path to my root of the Spring application, it works. I still don't know how to specify this without giving it the full path.

Answer 1

Relative paths are relative to the directory the Java process is launched from. If you have some startup script or similar look in the directory of this script. Absolute paths work fine, but of course you need permissions to write to it.
If you want a more generic solution for your case, you could for example set the right directory as a system property when starting the application and read it from there when creating your Properties. Or you try in another way to determine the full path of your app at runtime.

Answer 2

I couldn't find where the folders were located either so i came up with the following solution:
First i get the location of the working directory by calling System.getProperty("user.dir"). This is OS independent so it works both on linux and windows. The working directory is the directory from which your application is loaded. Next i simply append the relative path that i want as a location for my lucene indexes to the working directory folderpath. Then i use that as the value for hibernate.search.default.indexBase. Now i'll always know where to look for the lucene indexes.
Heres the code:
String luceneFilePath = System.getProperty("user.dir") + "/resources/lucene/indexes";
Properties props = new Properties();
props.put("hibernate.search.default.indexBase", luceneFilePath);
entityManagerFactory.setJpaProperties(props);