Profiles

Spring Profiles provide a way to segregate parts of your application configuration and make it be available only in certain environments. Any @Component, @Configuration or @ConfigurationProperties can be marked with @Profile to limit when it is loaded, as shown in the following example:

Java
Kotlin

import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Profile;

@Configuration(proxyBeanMethods = false)
@Profile("production")
public class ProductionConfiguration {

	// ...

}

import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Profile

@Configuration(proxyBeanMethods = false)
@Profile("production")
class ProductionConfiguration {

	// ...

}

If @ConfigurationProperties beans are registered through @EnableConfigurationProperties instead of automatic scanning, the @Profile annotation needs to be specified on the @Configuration class that has the @EnableConfigurationProperties annotation. In the case where @ConfigurationProperties are scanned, @Profile can be specified on the @ConfigurationProperties class itself.

You can use a spring.profiles.active Environment property to specify which profiles are active. You can specify the property in any of the ways described earlier in this chapter. For example, you could include it in your application.properties, as shown in the following example:

Properties
YAML

spring.profiles.active=dev,hsqldb

spring:
  profiles:
    active: "dev,hsqldb"

You could also specify it on the command line by using the following switch: --spring.profiles.active=dev,hsqldb.

If no profile is active, a default profile is enabled. The name of the default profile is default and it can be tuned using the spring.profiles.default Environment property, as shown in the following example:

Properties
YAML

spring.profiles.default=none

spring:
  profiles:
    default: "none"

spring.profiles.active and spring.profiles.default can only be used in non-profile specific documents. This means they cannot be included in profile specific files or documents activated by spring.config.activate.on-profile.

For example, the second document configuration is invalid:

Properties
YAML

spring.profiles.active=prod
#---
spring.config.activate.on-profile=prod
spring.profiles.active=metrics

# this document is valid
spring:
  profiles:
    active: "prod"
---
# this document is invalid
spring:
  config:
    activate:
      on-profile: "prod"
  profiles:
    active: "metrics"

Adding Active Profiles

The spring.profiles.active property follows the same ordering rules as other properties: The highest PropertySource wins. This means that you can specify active profiles in application.properties and then replace them by using the command line switch.

Sometimes, it is useful to have properties that add to the active profiles rather than replace them. The spring.profiles.include property can be used to add active profiles on top of those activated by the spring.profiles.active property. The SpringApplication entry point also has a Java API for setting additional profiles. See the setAdditionalProfiles() method in SpringApplication.

For example, when an application with the following properties is run, the common and local profiles will be activated even when it runs using the --spring.profiles.active switch:

Properties
YAML

spring.profiles.include[0]=common
spring.profiles.include[1]=local

spring:
  profiles:
    include:
      - "common"
      - "local"

Similar to spring.profiles.active, spring.profiles.include can only be used in non-profile specific documents. This means it cannot be included in profile specific files or documents activated by spring.config.activate.on-profile.

Profile groups, which are described in the next section can also be used to add active profiles if a given profile is active.

Profile Groups

Occasionally the profiles that you define and use in your application are too fine-grained and become cumbersome to use. For example, you might have proddb and prodmq profiles that you use to enable database and messaging features independently.

To help with this, Spring Boot lets you define profile groups. A profile group allows you to define a logical name for a related group of profiles.

For example, we can create a production group that consists of our proddb and prodmq profiles.

Properties
YAML

spring.profiles.group.production[0]=proddb
spring.profiles.group.production[1]=prodmq

spring:
  profiles:
    group:
      production:
      - "proddb"
      - "prodmq"

Our application can now be started using --spring.profiles.active=production to activate the production, proddb and prodmq profiles in one hit.

Programmatically Setting Profiles

You can programmatically set active profiles by calling SpringApplication.setAdditionalProfiles(…) before your application runs. It is also possible to activate profiles by using Spring’s ConfigurableEnvironment interface.

Profile-specific Configuration Files

Profile-specific variants of both application.properties (or application.yaml) and files referenced through @ConfigurationProperties are considered as files and loaded. See "Profile Specific Files" for details.