Spring Cloud Config Server

Spring Cloud Config Server provides an HTTP resource-based API for external configuration (name-value pairs or equivalent YAML content). The server is embeddable in a Spring Boot application, by using the @EnableConfigServer annotation. Consequently, the following application is a config server:

ConfigServer.java

@SpringBootApplication
@EnableConfigServer
public class ConfigServer {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    SpringApplication.run(ConfigServer.class, args);
  }
}

Like all Spring Boot applications, it runs on port 8080 by default, but you can switch it to the more conventional port 8888 in various ways. The easiest, which also sets a default configuration repository, is by launching it with spring.config.name=configserver (there is a configserver.yml in the Config Server jar). Another is to use your own application.properties, as shown in the following example:

application.properties

server.port: 8888
spring.cloud.config.server.git.uri: file://${user.home}/config-repo

where ${user.home}/config-repo is a git repository containing YAML and properties files.

On Windows, you need an extra "/" in the file URL if it is absolute with a drive prefix (for example,/${user.home}/config-repo).

The following listing shows a recipe for creating the git repository in the preceding example:

$ cd $HOME
$ mkdir config-repo
$ cd config-repo
$ git init .
$ echo info.foo: bar > application.properties
$ git add -A .
$ git commit -m "Add application.properties"

Using the local filesystem for your git repository is intended for testing only. You should use a server to host your configuration repositories in production.

The initial clone of your configuration repository can be quick and efficient if you keep only text files in it. If you store binary files, especially large ones, you may experience delays on the first request for configuration or encounter out of memory errors in the server.