Working Directory: Specifying paths

Document updated on Nov 17, 2023

Many components and options in KrakenD allow you to specify paths. In all of them, you can use absolute or relative paths.

For absolute paths, no possible interpretation or mistake arises when reading them. For instance, if you write /etc/krakend/krakend.json, you know exactly where this file is. Absolute paths are as clear as water but less convenient when your environments have different locations.

Relative paths, on the other hand, are helpful because you only specify a small part, but there is usually the question of the location of their corresponding base directory. For instance, if you write krakend.json, ./krakend.json, or ./config/krakend.json, what is their base directory?

The answer to this question is that all relative paths use the working directory as the base path. In a Docker container, for instance, this is what you specify in the instruction WORKDIR. Our Docker images use /etc/krakend unless you overwrite it in your Dockerfile.

In other installations, although we aim to default to /etc/krakend, you can still run the software from a different place and have a different working directory.

How to get the working directory

The short answer is to start the gateway and look for the following line early in the logs:

yyyy/mm/dd hh:mm:ss KRAKEND INFO: Working directory is /etc/krakend

This informative line was introduced in KrakenD 2.5

Now, if you set a relative path like a/b.tmpl, for instance, and the log tells you that the file does not exist, navigate to the base directory you saw in the console and see if the file is inside that location.