What's the purpose of META-INF?

Question

In Java, you often see a META-INF folder containing some meta files. What is the purpose of this folder and what can I put there?

Answer 1

Commonly articulating, you should not put anything into META-INF yourself. Rather, you should rely on against everything you apply to package up your JAR. This is one of the states where I believe Ant excels: defining JAR file visible characteristics. It's very simple to say something like:

<jar ...>

<manifest>

<attribute name="Main-Class" value="MyApplication"/>

</manifest>

</jar>

At the slightest, I guess that's clear... :-)

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The aim is that META-INF should be deemed an in-house Java meta record. Don't mess with it! Any data you want to combine with your JAR should be stored in some other sub-directory or at the source of the JAR itself.