Application profiles

In the previous example we created a configuration item applicationKey which holds the value 73RNNJIJFN83N3R3NKFNK.

But what needs to happen when this value is different between environments? For example in development you might want to use DEV:487FEF7E8F7E8F7E8 whereas in production you want the value PROD:FEU4349323FJ83NF.

To achieve this, you can use profiles and the @Profile annotation.

Place the following configuration items anywhere in the application-dev.yml and application-prod.yml files.

application-dev.yml

applicationKey: 'DEV:487FEF7E8F7E8F7E8'

application-prod.yml

applicationKey: 'PROD:FEU4349323FJ83NF'

Run the application.

$ mvn spring-boot:run

You should see the following in your console:

INFO --- [ost-startStop-1] c.e.demo.application.StartupLogger       : Your application key is: 73RNNJIJFN83N3R3NKFNK

Why is this?

You specified configuration values in several configuration files, but you did not specify which profile needs to be active. This can be done by specifying the spring.profiles.active property when starting the application.

A hint was also in the console:

INFO --- [  restartedMain] com.example.demo.DemoApplication         : Starting DemoApplication with PID 133348
INFO --- [  restartedMain] com.example.demo.DemoApplication         : No active profile set, falling back to default profiles: default

Let’s fix this and start our application with the dev profile.

$ mvn spring-boot:run -Dspring-boot.run.profiles=dev

Because we are running the application with the spring-boot-maven-plugin, the parameter that should be passed is actually spring-boot.run.profiles.

Alterntatively, an environment variable could be used instead:

$ SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=dev mvn spring-boot:run

You would get the same behaviour when using the following command line in case of an executable jar:

$ java -jar target/demo.jar -Dspring.profiles.active=dev

In the console you should now see:

INFO --- [  restartedMain] com.example.demo.DemoApplication         : Starting DemoApplication with PID 126896
INFO --- [  restartedMain] com.example.demo.DemoApplication         : The following profiles are active: dev
...
INFO --- [ost-startStop-1] c.e.demo.application.StartupLogger       : Your application key is: DEV:487FEF7E8F7E8F7E8

For production, the command line would be:

$ java -jar target/demo.jar -Dspring.profiles.active=prod

Note that it’s also possible to combine profiles, the following would activate the dev profile as well as the test-data profile.

$ java -jar target/demo.jar -Dspring.profiles.active=dev,test-data

Read the Spring Boot Profiles documentation for more configuration options.

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