application.properties & Git

#git #java #discuss

Tom Withers Apr 17, 2018 ・1 min read

Hi Everyone,

Ran into an issue at work today and I would like some opinions/help dealing with it.

so I have an application.properties file which basically contains

spring.profiles.active=***

where the asterixis are you basically define which profile you would like to use ie dev, uat, pre-prod, prod.

So when devs are working on there local machine they use the dev profile but sometimes forget to change this back when committing meaning that things point at the wrong place or use wrong logins etc... I originally thought I could just add application.properties to my .gitignore file and the remote version would stay correct on github and then devs would just create a application.properties locally and specify which profile to use. Turns out this didn't work and git just will not ignore the file without removing the remote ones too.

So does anybody have any recommendations? Any help would be much appreciated

Discussion (8)

Matteo Joliveau • Apr 17 '18

Never define your Spring profiles in application.properties.

Pass them as a CLI parameter via -Dspring.profiles.active=***, with empty as the default (dev) profile

Ivan Šarić • Apr 18 '18

I agree with Matteo when running the app in a dev environment, just add the --spring.profiles.active=x to the run configuration/arguments in your IDE.

For deploying on a server, whether its a test server or production, you could also include an external application.properties file next to your .jar/.war archive with the specified profile and your spring app will read it and override any clashing internally defined properties.

Whether you are using ant/maven/gradle as your build tool you can usually configure a target that will output your archive with the external configuration file specifying the profile for the environment you need.

Matteo Joliveau • Apr 18 '18

The way we usually go with Spring Boot is having a different application.yml(but it's the same with .properties) for every environment and switch them by passing the CLI parameter or via the SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE environment variable (very useful for containers).

So we have normally four files:

application.yml: base common configuration
application-dev.yml: local dev configuration, not committed to git and customized by every dev
application-test.yml: test server configuration
application-prod.yml: production server configuration

Optionally we could have more for specific use cases (e.g. in a project we have an application-openshift.yml for deploy on our Red Hat OpenShift PaaS).

Tom Withers • Apr 24 '18

Thanks for the information guys, seems like passing them as a CLI parameter will be the best option for us!

Ivan Jijon • Apr 9 '20 • Edited

Hi !
Did you find a way to solve your problem ?

We have multiple *.properties files, one per environment (local, dev, ...).
Our local.properties file is tracked by Git.
Since every developper adjusts the local.properties file to his environment the changes appear in the Working directory.
I am also looking for a clean way to avoid committing my local config files and .gitignoring them is not an option.

I would appreciate any clue 😄

Thx !