Great question—this is a common pitfall for folks building simple server-side apps, so let's break it down clearly.

Don't put it in your project's resource directory #

Here's why:

• Most server-side app deployment workflows (like packaging into a JAR, WAR, or container image) bundle your resource directory into a read-only package. When your app tries to write to saveFile.txt after deployment, it'll throw a permission error because you can't modify files inside the packaged app.
• Even if it works in your local dev environment (where resources are just regular files on your filesystem), it'll break as soon as you deploy to a real server.
• Updating your app code would risk overwriting the count file, losing all your accumulated data.

Store it as an independent file on the server #

This is the practical, production-ready approach, and here's how to do it right:

• Pick a dedicated directory on your server for app data—something like /var/data/your-counter-app/ (Linux) or C:\ProgramData\YourCounterApp\ (Windows). This keeps your data separate from your code.
• Make sure the user account running your server process has read/write permissions for this directory.
• In your code, use an absolute path to point to saveFile.txt in this directory (you can even set this path via an environment variable for flexibility across different servers).

Quick extra tip #

Since you're handling multi-user clicks, don't forget to handle concurrent writes! If two requests try to read/update the file at the same time, you might end up with incorrect counts. You can use file locking or atomic write operations to prevent this.

内容的提问来源于stack exchange，提问作者Stezzyg