Copy a directory from a jar file

Question

Hi.

I recently finished and application and created a jar file.

One of my classes creates an output directory populating it with files from it's resource.

The code is something like this:

// Copy files from dir "template" in this class resource to output.
private void createOutput(File output) throws IOException {

    File template = new File(FileHelper.URL2Path(getClass().getResource("template")));
    FileHelper.copyDirectory(template, output);
}

The problem is that now that I am running for a jar, this doesn't work.

I tried without luck:

• Using Streams to solve similar stuff on other classes but it doesn't work with dirs. Code was similar to http://www.exampledepot.com/egs/java.io/CopyFile.html
• Creating the File template with new File(getClass().getResource("template").toUri())

While writting this I was thinking about instead of having a template dir in the resource path having a zip file of it. Doing it this way I could get the file as an inputStream and unzip it where I need to. But I am not sure if it's the correct way.

Thanks for reading!

Answer 1

You could use the ClassLoader to obtain a stream to the resource. Once you have obtained an InputStream, you can read off, and write the contents of the stream, onto an OutputStream.

In your case, you'll need to create several OutputStream instances, one for each file that you want to copy over to the destination. This of course, requires that you know of the file names before hand.

For this task, it is preferred to use getResourceAsStream, rather than getResource or getResources().

Answer 2

I'm not sure what FileHelper is or does, but you will NOT be able to copy files (or directories) directly from JAR. Using InputStream as you've mentioned is the correct way (from either jar or zip):

InputStream is = getClass().getResourceAsStream("file_in_jar");
OutputStream os = new FileOutputStream("dest_file");
byte[] buffer = new byte[4096];
int length;
while ((length = is.read(buffer)) > 0) {
    os.write(buffer, 0, length);
}
os.close();
is.close();

You'll need to do the above (handling exceptions appropriately, of course) for each of your files. You may or may not be able (depending on your deployment configuration) to read jar file in question as JarFile (it may not be available as an actual file if deployed as part of non-expanded web app, for example). If you can read it, you should be able to iterate through list of JarEntry instances and thus reconstitute your directory structure; otherwise you may need to store it elsewhere (within text or xml resource, for example)

You may want to take a look at Commons IO library - it provides a lot of commonly used stream / file functionality including copying.

Answer 3

I think your approach of using a zip file makes sense. Presumably you'll do a getResourceAsStream to get at the internals of the zip, which will logically look like a directory tree.

A skeleton approach:

InputStream is = getClass().getResourceAsStream("my_embedded_file.zip");
ZipInputStream zis = new ZipInputStream(is);
ZipEntry entry;

while ((entry = zis.getNextEntry()) != null) {
    // do something with the entry - for example, extract the data 
}

Answer 4

I hated the idea of using the ZIP file method posted earlier, so I came up with the following.

public void copyResourcesRecursively(URL originUrl, File destination) throws Exception {
    URLConnection urlConnection = originUrl.openConnection();
    if (urlConnection instanceof JarURLConnection) {
        copyJarResourcesRecursively(destination, (JarURLConnection) urlConnection);
    } else if (urlConnection instanceof FileURLConnection) {
        FileUtils.copyFilesRecusively(new File(originUrl.getPath()), destination);
    } else {
        throw new Exception("URLConnection[" + urlConnection.getClass().getSimpleName() +
                "] is not a recognized/implemented connection type.");
    }
}

public void copyJarResourcesRecursively(File destination, JarURLConnection jarConnection ) throws IOException {
    JarFile jarFile = jarConnection.getJarFile();
    for (JarEntry entry : CollectionUtils.iterable(jarFile.entries())) {
        if (entry.getName().startsWith(jarConnection.getEntryName())) {
            String fileName = StringUtils.removeStart(entry.getName(), jarConnection.getEntryName());
            if (!entry.isDirectory()) {
                InputStream entryInputStream = null;
                try {
                    entryInputStream = jarFile.getInputStream(entry);
                    FileUtils.copyStream(entryInputStream, new File(destination, fileName));
                } finally {
                    FileUtils.safeClose(entryInputStream);
                }
            } else {
                FileUtils.ensureDirectoryExists(new File(destination, fileName));
            }
        }
    }
}

Example Useage (copies all files from the classpath resource "config" to "${homeDirectory}/config":

File configHome = new File(homeDirectory, "config/");
//noinspection ResultOfMethodCallIgnored
configHome.mkdirs();
copyResourcesRecursively(super.getClass().getResource("/config"), configHome);

This should work both for copying from both flat files as well as Jar files.

Note: The code above uses some custom utility classes (FileUtils, CollectionUtils) as well as some from Apache commons-lang (StringUtils), but the functions should be named fairly obviously.

Answer 5

Could you post those custom utilities? I believe your code is exactly what I was looking for but had no idea where to start.

Answer 6

Thanks for the solution! For others, the following doesn't make use of the auxiliary classes (except for StringUtils)

public class FileUtils {
  public static boolean copyFile(final File toCopy, final File destFile) {
    try {
      return FileUtils.copyStream(new FileInputStream(toCopy),
          new FileOutputStream(destFile));
    } catch (final FileNotFoundException e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return false;
  }

  private static boolean copyFilesRecusively(final File toCopy,
      final File destDir) {
    assert destDir.isDirectory();

    if (!toCopy.isDirectory()) {
      return FileUtils.copyFile(toCopy, new File(destDir, toCopy.getName()));
    } else {
      final File newDestDir = new File(destDir, toCopy.getName());
      if (!newDestDir.exists() && !newDestDir.mkdir()) {
        return false;
      }
      for (final File child : toCopy.listFiles()) {
        if (!FileUtils.copyFilesRecusively(child, newDestDir)) {
          return false;
        }
      }
    }
    return true;
  }

  public static boolean copyJarResourcesRecursively(final File destDir,
      final JarURLConnection jarConnection) throws IOException {

    final JarFile jarFile = jarConnection.getJarFile();

    for (final Enumeration<JarEntry> e = jarFile.entries(); e.hasMoreElements();) {
      final JarEntry entry = e.nextElement();
      if (entry.getName().startsWith(jarConnection.getEntryName())) {
        final String filename = StringUtils.removeStart(entry.getName(), //
            jarConnection.getEntryName());

        final File f = new File(destDir, filename);
        if (!entry.isDirectory()) {
          final InputStream entryInputStream = jarFile.getInputStream(entry);
          if(!FileUtils.copyStream(entryInputStream, f)){
            return false;
          }
          entryInputStream.close();
        } else {
          if (!FileUtils.ensureDirectoryExists(f)) {
            throw new IOException("Could not create directory: "
                + f.getAbsolutePath());
          }
        }
      }
    }
    return true;
  }

  public static boolean copyResourcesRecursively( //
      final URL originUrl, final File destination) {
    try {
      final URLConnection urlConnection = originUrl.openConnection();
      if (urlConnection instanceof JarURLConnection) {
        return FileUtils.copyJarResourcesRecursively(destination,
            (JarURLConnection) urlConnection);
      } else {
        return FileUtils.copyFilesRecusively(new File(originUrl.getPath()),
            destination);
      }
    } catch (final IOException e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return false;
  }

  private static boolean copyStream(final InputStream is, final File f) {
    try {
      return FileUtils.copyStream(is, new FileOutputStream(f));
    } catch (final FileNotFoundException e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return false;
  }

  private static boolean copyStream(final InputStream is, final OutputStream os) {
    try {
      final byte[] buf = new byte[1024];

      int len = 0;
      while ((len = is.read(buf)) > 0) {
        os.write(buf, 0, len);
      }
      is.close();
      os.close();
      return true;
    } catch (final IOException e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return false;
  }

  private static boolean ensureDirectoryExists(final File f) {
    return f.exists() || f.mkdir();
  }
}