How to use a path relative to project root to H2 db-file configuration with Play Framework 2.4?

Question

We're developing a Play 2.4 application (Java API).

For dev purposes, we'd like to use a persistent H2 database with DB file path relative to the project root directory.

In How to use a persistent H2 database in the Play Framework instead of in-memory there was solution for Play 2.0:

db.default.url="jdbc:h2:file:data/db"

However, with Play 2.4 this doesn't seem to work but I get error message with the following exception at the bottom:

Caused by: org.h2.jdbc.JdbcSQLException: A file path that is implicitly 
relative to the current working directory is not allowed in the database
URL "jdbc:h2:file:data/db". Use an absolute path, ~/name, ./name, or the 
baseDir setting instead. [90011-187]
    at org.h2.message.DbException.getJdbcSQLException(DbException.java:345)
    at org.h2.message.DbException.get(DbException.java:179)
    ...

I could get connection to work with an absolute path and with a path relative to the home directory, like the following:

db.default.url="jdbc:h2:file:/Users/foo/data/db"

or

db.default.url="jdbc:h2:~/data/db"

However, is there some way to refer to the project root folder?

@Roman Seems to work, thanks. Don't know whether that could be fragile if process would be started from different directory in some way. But for our development usage this is not a problem. Would you like to add that as an answer? — Touko

Roman Roman · Accepted Answer · 2015-06-03T06:41:47

Ok, I did a little research and found this in the changelog (http://www.h2database.com/html/changelog.html):

Implicit relative paths are disabled (system property "h2.implicitRelativePath"), so that the database URL jdbc:h2:test now needs to be written as jdbc:h2:./test.

In H2 starting from version 1.4.177 Beta, implicit relative paths are not allowed anymore. Therefore, in your case the url should be written with a explicit relative path: db.default.url="jdbc:h2:./data/db".

How to use a path relative to project root to H2 db-file configuration with Play Framework 2.4?

2 Answers