A SpringApplication
has bean properties (mainly setters) so you can use its Java API as
you create the application to modify its behavior. Or you can externalize the
configuration using properties in spring.main.*
. E.g. in application.properties
you
might have.
spring.main.web_environment=false spring.main.banner_mode=off
and then the Spring Boot banner will not be printed on startup, and the application will not be a web application.
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The example above also demonstrates how flexible binding allows the use of
underscores ( |
Properties defined in external configuration overrides the values specified via the Java
API with the notable exception of the sources used to create the ApplicationContext
. Let’s
consider this application
new SpringApplicationBuilder() .bannerMode(Banner.Mode.OFF) .sources(demo.MyApp.class) .run(args);
used with the following configuration:
spring.main.sources=com.acme.Config,com.acme.ExtraConfig spring.main.banner_mode=console
The actual application will now show the banner (as overridden by configuration) and use
three sources for the ApplicationContext
(in that order): demo.MyApp
, com.acme.Config
,
com.acme.ExtraConfig
.
By default properties from different sources are added to the Spring Environment
in a
defined order (see Chapter 24, Externalized Configuration in
the ‘Spring Boot features’ section for the exact order).
A nice way to augment and modify this is to add @PropertySource
annotations to your
application sources. Classes passed to the SpringApplication
static convenience
methods, and those added using setSources()
are inspected to see if they have
@PropertySources
, and if they do, those properties are added to the Environment
early
enough to be used in all phases of the ApplicationContext
lifecycle. Properties added
in this way have lower
priority than any added using the default locations (e.g. `application.properties), system properties, environment variables or the command line.
You can also provide System properties (or environment variables) to change the behavior:
spring.config.name
(SPRING_CONFIG_NAME
), defaults to application
as the root of
the file name.spring.config.location
(SPRING_CONFIG_LOCATION
) is the file to load (e.g. a classpath
resource or a URL). A separate Environment
property source is set up for this document
and it can be overridden by system properties, environment variables or the
command line.No matter what you set in the environment, Spring Boot will always load
application.properties
as described above. If YAML is used then files with the ‘.yml’
extension are also added to the list by default.
Spring Boot logs the configuration files that are loaded at DEBUG
level and the
candidates it has not found at TRACE
level.
See ConfigFileApplicationListener
for more detail.
Some people like to use (for example) --port=9000
instead of --server.port=9000
to
set configuration properties on the command line. You can easily enable this by using
placeholders in application.properties
, e.g.
server.port=${port:8080}
![]() | Tip |
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If you are inheriting from the |
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In this specific case the port binding will work in a PaaS environment like Heroku
and Cloud Foundry, since in those two platforms the |
YAML is a superset of JSON and as such is a very convenient syntax for storing external properties in a hierarchical format. E.g.
spring: application: name: cruncher datasource: driverClassName: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver url: jdbc:mysql://localhost/test server: port: 9000
Create a file called application.yml
and stick it in the root of your classpath, and
also add snakeyaml
to your dependencies (Maven coordinates org.yaml:snakeyaml
, already
included if you use the spring-boot-starter
). A YAML file is parsed to a Java
Map<String,Object>
(like a JSON object), and Spring Boot flattens the map so that it
is 1-level deep and has period-separated keys, a lot like people are used to with
Properties
files in Java.
The example YAML above corresponds to an application.properties
file
spring.application.name=cruncher spring.datasource.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/test server.port=9000
See Section 24.6, “Using YAML instead of Properties” in the ‘Spring Boot features’ section for more information about YAML.
The Spring Environment
has an API for this, but normally you would set a System property
(spring.profiles.active
) or an OS environment variable (SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE
). E.g.
launch your application with a -D
argument (remember to put it before the main class
or jar archive):
$ java -jar -Dspring.profiles.active=production demo-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar
In Spring Boot you can also set the active profile in application.properties
, e.g.
spring.profiles.active=production
A value set this way is replaced by the System property or environment variable setting,
but not by the SpringApplicationBuilder.profiles()
method. Thus the latter Java API can
be used to augment the profiles without changing the defaults.
See Chapter 25, Profiles in the ‘Spring Boot features’ section for more information.
A YAML file is actually a sequence of documents separated by ---
lines, and each
document is parsed separately to a flattened map.
If a YAML document contains a spring.profiles
key, then the profiles value
(comma-separated list of profiles) is fed into the Spring
Environment.acceptsProfiles()
and if any of those profiles is active that document is
included in the final merge (otherwise not).
Example:
server: port: 9000 --- spring: profiles: development server: port: 9001 --- spring: profiles: production server: port: 0
In this example the default port is 9000, but if the Spring profile ‘development’ is active then the port is 9001, and if ‘production’ is active then it is 0.
The YAML documents are merged in the order they are encountered (so later values override earlier ones).
To do the same thing with properties files you can use application-${profile}.properties
to specify profile-specific values.
Spring Boot binds external properties from application.properties
(or .yml
) (and
other places) into an application at runtime. There is not (and technically cannot be)
an exhaustive list of all supported properties in a single location because contributions
can come from additional jar files on your classpath.
A running application with the Actuator features has a configprops
endpoint that shows
all the bound and bindable properties available through @ConfigurationProperties
.
The appendix includes an application.properties
example with a list of the most common properties supported by
Spring Boot. The definitive list comes from searching the source code for
@ConfigurationProperties
and @Value
annotations, as well as the occasional use of
RelaxedPropertyResolver
.