How to set Spring profiles for deploying to Heroku - spring-boot

Question

I have a Spring web app, with 3 different profiles for prod dev and test Each of these uses a different database, local for test and dev and a heroku postgres for prod.
I have set up my application.yaml file as below,
spring:
profiles:
active:
- dev
datasource:
url: jdbc:postgresql://ec2-35-168-65-132.compute-1.amazonaws.com:5432/*******
username: username
password: ******************
jpa:
properties:
hibernate:
dialect: org.hibernate.dialect.PostgreSQLDialect
jpa:
hibernate:
ddl-auto: update
properties:
hibernate:
dialect: org.hibernate.dialect.PostgreSQLDialect
format_sql: true
show-sql: true
javax:
persistence:
validation:
mode: none
show-sql: true
data:
web:
pageable:
default-page-size: 10
max-page-size: 100
---
spring:
config:
activate:
on-profile: prod
datasource:
url: jdbc:postgresql://ec2-35-168-65-132.compute-1.amazonaws.com:5432/********
username: username
password: **********
jpa:
hibernate:
ddl-auto: update
syftgolf:
upload-path: uploads-prod
---
spring:
config:
activate:
on-profile: dev
datasource:
url: jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/testdb
username: postgres
password: admin
jpa:
hibernate:
ddl-auto: create-drop
syftgolf:
upload-path: uploads-dev
---
spring:
config:
activate:
on-profile: test
datasource:
url: jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/syftgolf
username: postgres
password: admin
jpa:
hibernate:
ddl-auto: create-drop
syftgolf:
upload-path: uploads-test
I have slowly been updating this app over the months from a barebones project I did. I cant for the life of me, remember what this first part does.
spring:
profiles:
active:
- dev
datasource:
url: jdbc:postgresql://ec2-35-168-65-132.compute-1.amazonaws.com:5432/*********
username: username
password: *********
jpa:
properties:
hibernate:
dialect: org.hibernate.dialect.PostgreSQLDialect
jpa:
hibernate:
ddl-auto: update
properties:
hibernate:
dialect: org.hibernate.dialect.PostgreSQLDialect
format_sql: true
show-sql: true
javax:
persistence:
validation:
mode: none
show-sql: true
data:
web:
pageable:
default-page-size: 10
max-page-size: 100
I think spring:profiles:active: -dev sets the active profile to dev, so it should then use the database under dev? But I cant remember why the rest of the lines are placed here and not under a specific profile,
datasource:
url: jdbc:postgresql://ec2-35-168-65-132.compute-1.amazonaws.com:5432/***********
username: username
password: *************************
jpa:
properties:
hibernate:
dialect: org.hibernate.dialect.PostgreSQLDialect
jpa:
hibernate:
ddl-auto: update
properties:
hibernate:
dialect: org.hibernate.dialect.PostgreSQLDialect
format_sql: true
show-sql: true
javax:
persistence:
validation:
mode: none
show-sql: true
data:
web:
pageable:
default-page-size: 10
max-page-size: 100
if I remove this and just leave the active profile part, I get an error that the app cant start.
Please could someone help with the best way of laying out this application.yaml file and also is setting active profile in this file the correct way of doing it?
So if I am working on the app, i set this to dev do I then need to change it to prod before I push it to heroku using the heroku cli?

Answer 1

The best way would be to save an environment variable in your heroku application which will be using by your application to set the profile.
For example, this is a configuration for a simple spring boot thymeleaf application.
server:
port: ${PORT:4000}
spring:
application:
name: PROFILE-TEST
---
spring:
config:
activate:
on-profile: dev
custom:
message: "This is development environment"
---
spring:
config:
activate:
on-profile: prod
custom:
message: "This is production environment"
---
spring:
profiles:
active: ${PROFILE:dev}
Here I'm using spring.config.activate.on-profile to set an environment to have different custom.message.
By Default I'm setting the active profile with spring.profiles.active=${PROFILE:dev}. PROFILE is the environment variable we're gonna use to set different value during deployment. If there is no environment variable set for PROFILE, it'll default back to dev.
Now if I've written a controller which will only act on profile dev with the #Profile annotation like this
#Profile("dev")
#Controller
#RequestMapping("/")
#RequiredArgsConstructor
public class DevHomeController {
private final CustomConfigurationProperties customConfigurationProperties;
#GetMapping
public ModelAndView home(ModelAndView modelAndView) {
modelAndView.addObject("message", customConfigurationProperties.getMessage());
modelAndView.setViewName("dev-home.html");
return modelAndView;
}
}
It'll show something like
I've written another controller which will have a profile value #Profile("prod")
In the console type the below command to set an environment variable in heroku.
heroku config:set PROFILE=prod
And deploy the application. I'll look like
The message you see on the screen is coming from custom.message property you have set in your application.yml, and as we have set the environment variable for PROFILE, heroku is using that to set the running profile.