I have an Spring Boot application, which has a number of properties and is delivered to an "external" customer.
Most properties have sane defaults, so they are added to application.properties and one can identify them there.
But there are also some properties which do not have a sane default, they must be defined by the external customer, thus they are currently included in application.properties with a dummy-value (to-be-replaced), but it's easy to miss such a property and Spring will not complain the property missing but trying to load it, which sometimes (hostnames, ...) leads to unexpected results.
The project is built with Maven -- is there maybe a way already a way to scan the project during build for all #Value() annotations and generate some kind of report?
Then the devs could define those values-without-default simply using #Value, the report will show them as having no default and one thus knows which properties are necessary to set.
Related
New to Spring Boot here, long-time Spring Framework user though.
I'm looking for a way to split my externalised configuration into multiple .properties files, for better readability and manageability.
I already saw this SO answer: having the ability to specify a list of configuration file names in spring.config.name (which, by the way, doesn't seem to be mentioned in Boot reference documentation, correct me if I'm wrong) would solve my problem perfectly, however that configuration property can be specified only via system properties or environment variables. If I try to specify it inside my application.properties file, it gets ignored. The same happens for spring.config.additional-location. I understand this happens because, when application.properties is read, it's too late to tell Spring Boot to search for different externalised configuration file names. However this is not a proper solution, because the way I split my configuration should be an "implementation detail" that the consumer of my application shouldn't be aware of, so I don't expect the consumer to specify an external parameter otherwise my application breaks out-of-the-box.
I think that a way to do this should be provided. Perhaps some import mechanism for .properties files or the ability to specify spring.config.name even in application.properties (some known and reasonable limitations would be acceptable).
The best I could find out is to use #PropertySource, but this is not profile aware: unless you use some ugly nested class hack, or you put spring.profiles.active variable in the resource name (which will break if multiple profiles have been activated), you won't get the benefit you have for application.properties profile-specific files.
I was not able to find an "official way" to do this, apart from some statements from Spring Boot devs that say that they're rather promoting the use of a single (possibly giant...) externalised configuration file. It seems like this position is not so popular, judging from the post reactions on GitHub, and IMHO it really seems to be a basic feature missing. I have been working with multiple properties files in Spring Framework (using XML configuration) for years and I never felt that having an only huge file would have been better.
If I understand it right, in Boot 1.x this was in some way possible using the location attribute of #ConfigurationProperties, which is however missing in Boot 2.x.
Any suggestion?
Have you tried with Spring Profile?
What you can do is create application-file1.properties/yml, application-file2.properties/yml and put it in config location and then add spring.profile.active=<your env profiles>,file1,file2.
It will load the files.
This profile entry can be in bootstrap.yml, or JVM args to application, in Manifest-<env>.yml in case of Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Not sure on AWS and other cloud provider.
Hope this will help.
I'm planning to run our own Spring Initializr instance. Is there a way to have a set of application properties get written (to application.yml) when a certain option is chosen, ideally in a separate section for each of a set of predefined profiles? I've looked into customising the project-generation process in Initializr and at creating a custom starter. I've come across auto-configuration for starters, but that seems to be about what configuration to default to when this has not been provided by properties, whereas I am after generating the properties. I've also come across an example of a custom Spring Initializr instance generating files, but I need it to modify application.yml without clobbering any other modifications that may have been made to it.
Spring Initializr (the library behind start.spring.io) does not have yaml support and does not allow you to write such file automatically when the project is generated.
It's easy enough for you to add that feature though. The way it works is through a model that contributors would tune + a writer that transform the model into the target output. An analogy of this would be MavenBuild and MavenBuildWriter that generates Maven's pom.xml.
Auto-configuration is indeed completely unrelated to code/configuration generation so no need to look there.
I mean the Eclipse preference under Window|Preferences|Spring|Beans Support
"Disable Auto Config Detection".
When this option is not checked, I notice a delay when saving Java files:
Building Workspace...
Loading ...ServerApplication
or
Loading ...DaoConfig
These messages are for Spring Boot main application classes (ServerApplication) or Spring configuration classes with #ComponentScan (DaoConfig) which are located in the workspace.
This can take a few seconds, which is a bit annoying.
When I check the above preference option, I don't notice the delay for loading these classes (at least for the Spring Boot main classes).
What are the consequences of disabling Auto Config Detection, e.g. what does this option really do, what functionality do I loose? Any pointers to documentation?
Can I speed up the save process without having to disable Auto Config Detection?
In STS3, the IDE creates an internal model of your Spring application, so that it can display a nice overview of your Spring elements in the Spring Explorer view, provide content-assist in Spring XML config files and more. In order to build up this internal Spring beans model, it needs to know where to start from when building that model. You can define those entry points manually in the properties for each project: Spring -> Beans Support. That preference allows you to define Spring XML config files and/or Spring-annotated configuration classes to be used by the IDE internally to build up that model.
In addition to that there is a mechanism to detect those files (Spring XML config files and Spring Boot application configuration annotations) automatically, so that you don't need to configure them manually. But the result is the same. Those files/classes end up being configured to be used by the IDE to built this internal model.
I guess that the delay that you see comes from building this internal beans model - this is at least what the messages indicate that you mentioned.
So far for the background. You can disable that auto-config mechanism and you don't need to configure those files/classes manually. This will result in the Spring Explorer, for example, not showing anything meaningful for those projects.
As an alternative and in case you are working mostly with Spring Boot projects, I would strongly recommend to switch to the all-new Spring Tools 4 (also available as a ready-to-use Eclipse distribution). It provides a slightly different set of features and is implemented in a different way, so that it doesn't need the expensive internal bean model creation. You should give it a try. And if you are missing something that you love in STS3 that is not yet part of Spring Tools 4, let us know.
I have a Spring-Boot project which works with DB-connections and a lot of other stuff.
Now I added another "main-class" to the project. The thing is: by starting this class, all configuration settings (which come from application.yml) are loaded. But thats not what I want.
I want the project to start without trying to bind to any datasource...
But how?
Why do you add several main classes? Try using different profiles instead. And you can start your application with the -Dspring.profiles.active=? property.
Example:
Just add a application-test.properties and run your application with -Dspring-profiles.active=test and the properties in the test property file will be loaded. And potentially overwrite properties with the same key in application.properties.
We are using spring boot in a multi-module project.
We have a Domain access module which has the common domain object classes, repositories, together with configuration for the datasource, JPA, Hibernate, etc. These are configured using a application.properties. We put all this configuration into the common module to save duplicating these common configurations in the higher level modules.
This all works fine when building the domain module, so the configurations are loaded correctly in the test units.
However the problems start when we try to use the domain module in the higher layer modules; they have their own application.properties which means Spring loads them and not the the Domain module application.properties, which this means the data source is not configured because only the higher module application.properties are loaded.
What we would like is both the domain module and higher level application properties to be loaded by Spring. But we can't see any easy way to do this.
I'm thinking this must be a common problem, and wonder if there any recommended solutions for this problem?
As we are using spring-boot the solution should ideally use annotations instead of applictionContext.xml.
Maybe you should only use application.properties in the top-level aggregator project?
You can always use #PropertySource in the child projects to configure them with a name that is specific to their use case.
Or you can use different names for each project and glue them together in the top-level project using spring.config.location (comma-separated).
I agree with #Dave Syer. The idea of splitting an application into multiple modules is that each of those is an independent unit, in this case a jar file. Theoretically you could split each of those jar files into their own source repositories, and then use them across multiple projects. Let's say you want to reuse these domain classes in both a web and batch application, if all the APPLICATION level configuration is stored within each of the individual modules, it severely reduces their reusability.
IMO only the aggregating module should contain all of the configuration necessary to run as an application, everything else is simply a dependency that can be remixed and reused as necessary.
Maybe another approach could be to define specific profiles for each module and use the application.properties file just to specify which profiles are active
using the spring.profiles.include property.
domain-module
- application.properties
- application-domain.properties
app-module
- application.properties
- application-app.properties
and into the application.properties file of app-module
spring.profiles.include=domain,app
Another thing you can do (besides only using application.properties at the top-level as Dave Syer mentions) is to name the properties file of the domain module something like domainConfig.properties.
That way you avoid the name clash with application.properties.
domainConfig.properties would contain all the data needed for the domain module to be able to tested on it's own. The integration with the rest of the code can easily be done either using multiple #PropertySource (one for domainConfig.properties and one for application.properties) or configuring a PropertySourcesPlaceholderConfigurer bean in your Java Config (check out this tutorial) that refers to all the needed property files
in spring-boot since 2.4 support spring.config.import
e.g
application.name=myapp
spring.config.import=developer.properties
# import from other module
spring.config.import=classpath:application-common.properties
or with spring.config.activate.on-profile
spring.config.activate.on-profile=prod
spring.config.import=prod.properties
ref: https://spring.io/blog/2020/08/14/config-file-processing-in-spring-boot-2-4