Question: I am developing a web application using Spring Boot, and want to generate war instead of jar.

It works very fine using the conversion from jar to war described here : <http://spring.io/guides/gs/convert-jar-to-war/>

But I want to exclude the application.properties from the war, because I use `@PropertySource(value = "file:${OPENSHIFT_DATA_DIR}/application.properties")` to get the file path on production environment.

* This method works when generating my war, but in eclipse I can't run my application because application.properties not copied at all to target/classes :

```
<build>
    <resources> 
        <resource> 
            <directory>src/main/resources</directory> 
            <excludes> 
                <exclude>application.properties</exclude> 
            </excludes> 
        </resource> 
     </resources> 
</build>

```
* This method doesn't work at all, I think that spring-boot-maven-plugin doesn't support packagingExcludes :

```
<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
            <configuration> 
                <packagingExcludes>WEB-INF/classes/application.properties</packagingExcludes> 
            </configuration> 
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

```

Have you another suggestion?

Thanks

Answer: 
Try using the solution below. This will work:

```
<build>
    <resources>
         <resource>
            <directory>src/main/resources</directory>
            <filtering>true</filtering>
            <excludes>
                <exclude>**/*.properties</exclude>
            </excludes>
        </resource>
    </resources>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

```

If you are using the above solution , while running the project in Eclipse IDE you may get error that the properties file is not found. To get rid of this you need to add the resources folder in Run as configuration.(Run configurations... -> Classpath -> User Entries -> Advanced... -> Add Folders)
The solution I added is to unzip my packaged war, delete the file application.properties and create a new war named ROOT.war using maven-antrun-plugin and run some ant tasks.

this is what i added to my plugins in pom.xml :

```
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
<executions>
    <execution>
        <id>package</id>
        <phase>package</phase>
        <configuration>
            <target>
                <unzip src="target/${artifactId}-${version}.${packaging}" dest="target/ROOT/" />
                <delete file="target/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes/application.properties"/>
                <zip destfile="target/ROOT.war" basedir="target/ROOT" encoding="UTF-8"/>
                <delete dir="target/ROOT"/>
            </target>
        </configuration>
        <goals>
            <goal>run</goal>
        </goals>
    </execution>
</executions>
</plugin>

```

I named my target war as ROOT.war because I am using tomcat on openshift PaaS, so I just copy my ROOT.war and push to my openshift repo. That's it