Rather than hardcoding some properties that are also specified in your project’s build configuration, you can automatically expand them using the existing build configuration instead. This is possible in both Maven and Gradle.

72.1.1 Automatic property expansion using Maven

You can automatically expand properties from the Maven project using resource filtering. If you use the spring-boot-starter-parent you can then refer to your Maven ‘project properties’ via @..@ placeholders, e.g.

app.encoding[email protected]@
app.java.version[email protected]@

	Tip
	The spring-boot:run can add src/main/resources directly to the classpath (for hot reloading purposes) if you enable the addResources flag. This circumvents the resource filtering and this feature. You can use the exec:java goal instead or customize the plugin’s configuration, see the plugin usage page for more details.

If you don’t use the starter parent, in your pom.xml you need (inside the <build/> element):

<resources>
    <resource>
        <directory>src/main/resources</directory>
        <filtering>true</filtering>
    </resource>
</resources>

and (inside <plugins/>):

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-resources-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.7</version>
    <configuration>
        <delimiters>
            <delimiter>@</delimiter>
        </delimiters>
        <useDefaultDelimiters>false</useDefaultDelimiters>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

	Note
	The useDefaultDelimiters property is important if you are using standard Spring placeholders in your configuration (e.g. ${foo}). These may be expanded by the build if that property is not set to false.

72.1.2 Automatic property expansion using Gradle

You can automatically expand properties from the Gradle project by configuring the Java plugin’s processResources task to do so:

processResources {
    expand(project.properties)
}

You can then refer to your Gradle project’s properties via placeholders, e.g.

app.name=${name}
app.description=${description}

	Note
	Gradle’s expand method uses Groovy’s SimpleTemplateEngine which transforms ${..} tokens. The ${..} style conflicts with Spring’s own property placeholder mechanism. To use Spring property placeholders together with automatic expansion the Spring property placeholders need to be escaped like \${..}.

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.

	Note
	The example above also demonstrates how flexible binding allows the use of underscores (_) as well as dashes (-) in property names.

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:

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

If you are inheriting from the spring-boot-starter-parent POM, the default filter token of the maven-resources-plugins has been changed from ${*} to @ (i.e. @maven.token@ instead of ${maven.token}) to prevent conflicts with Spring-style placeholders. If you have enabled maven filtering for the application.properties directly, you may want to also change the default filter token to use other delimiters.

	Note
	In this specific case the port binding will work in a PaaS environment like Heroku and Cloud Foundry, since in those two platforms the PORT environment variable is set automatically and Spring can bind to capitalized synonyms for Environment properties.

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.