Sometimes on portlet development, we need to write and read file inside WEB-INf folder …

if we use tomcat as web apllication server, liferay automatically create context.xml on META-INF folderwith the following content :

antiJARLocking=”true”
antiResourceLocking=”true”

The fact that application is ran from temp folder is most likely due to configuration in META-INF/context.xml (see Tomcat docs for more information about in this subject).
so if invoke the following code to get real path :

PortletUtils.getRealPath(getPortletContext(), “”)

it will return temp folder, not webapps folder.

to avoid this thing happen, change context.xml above with the following line :

antiJARLocking=”false”
antiResourceLocking=”false”

then restart the application server.

this will solve the realpath problem, and now the application will return webappas folder not temp folder …

(tested on liferay 5.2.3, tomcat 6.0.18)