What are Profiles in Spring Boot

Profiles can be seen as different environments in spring boot application. Suppose you are working on an application where you have different staging environments like Dev, QA, UAT, Production etc. So you will have different configurations for each environment, for this kind of applications what you need is having different values that can be switched depending upon some flags.


Suppose we have database name configurations for our application as follows

• Dev   - ekiras_dev
• QA    - ekiras_qa
• UAT  - ekiras_uat
• Prod  - ekiras

Now, we can use profiling in this case. How we will do it ? lets see

Creating Profiles in Spring Boot 

We will create different files for different environments and call then as profile in rest of the blog.
e.g



All the application files should either be under the resources folder or any folder that is in classpath. (resources/ is in class path by default).

How Spring Boot Load Profiles

Points To Remember

There are two ways to set the spring profiles

• Using OS environment variables
• Using -D arguments

How to set active profile in spring boot application

If you want to set Operating System Environment variables for your application the you can do as follows

export SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=development
export SERVER_PORT=8090
gradle bootRun
java -jar build/libs/demo-1.0.0.jar

If you want to specify it each time while running jar then you can do as follows

java -jar -Dspring.profiles.active=development build/libs/dem-1.0.0.jar
java -jar -Dserver.port=8090 build/libs/demo-1.0.0.jar

Points To Remember

You can use the Environment interface in package org.springframework.core.env to get the current profiles in spring application.

You can make use of the following methods to get the information about the profiles.

• acceptsProfiles(String ...profiles) - returns if the profiles given in input is active.
• getActiveProfiles() - Gives a list of profiles explicitly made active for this enviornment.
• getDefaultProfiles() - gives a set of profiles to be active by default if no active profile is set explicitly.

See how to set and configure profiles in spring.

Must Read :: What are profiles in Spring boot.

How to get Active Profiles in an Environment

All you need to do is

• autowire the Environmnet bean.
• call the getActiveProfiles method of the bean.

package com.ekiras.config;

import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.core.env.Environment;

@Component
class Test {

  @Autowired private Environment environment;

  public void test(){
     for(String profile : environment.getActiveProfiles()){
            System.out.println(">>>>>>"+profile);
        }
  }

}

When the above method is called it will give the following output.

>>>>>>dev