Environment-based profiles in Spring Boot

Introduction

Environment-based profiles help your application use different settings for different places, like your computer or a live server. This keeps things organized and safe.

You want to use a test database on your computer but a real database on the live server.

You need to turn on extra logging only when debugging locally.

You want to use different email services for development and production.

You want to enable or disable features depending on where the app runs.

You want to keep secret keys safe by not putting them in the main code.

Syntax

Spring Boot

spring.profiles.active=profileName

# In application-profileName.properties or application-profileName.yml
property.key=value

Profiles are named sets of configuration you can switch between.

You activate a profile by setting spring.profiles.active in your main config or environment.

Examples

This example shows two profiles: dev and prod. The app uses port 8081 in dev and port 80 in prod.

Spring Boot

# application.properties
spring.profiles.active=dev

# application-dev.properties
server.port=8081

# application-prod.properties
server.port=80

Using YAML format, the test profile sets logging to debug level.

Spring Boot

# application.yml
spring:
  profiles:
    active: test

# application-test.yml
logging:
  level:
    root: DEBUG

You can also choose the profile when starting the app from the command line.

Spring Boot

# Activate profile via command line
java -jar app.jar --spring.profiles.active=prod

Sample Program

This Spring Boot app has two beans. One runs only if the dev profile is active, the other only if prod is active. When you run the app with --spring.profiles.active=dev, it prints the dev message. With prod, it prints the prod message.

Spring Boot

package com.example.demo;

import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Profile;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;

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

@Component
@Profile("dev")
class DevBean {
    public DevBean() {
        System.out.println("Dev profile active: Using development settings.");
    }
}

@Component
@Profile("prod")
class ProdBean {
    public ProdBean() {
        System.out.println("Prod profile active: Using production settings.");
    }
}

Important Notes

You can have multiple profiles active at once by separating them with commas.

Use profiles to keep secrets and environment differences out of your main code.

Check which profile is active by printing or logging spring.profiles.active.

Summary

Profiles let your app use different settings for different environments.

Activate profiles in config files or command line.

Use @Profile to run code only for certain profiles.