Spring Boot - set location of application.properties in war file

Question

I'm trying to build a war file that knows to look in a specific path for a spring boot application.properties. For example, when running in a linux environment,

I'd like my maven build to some how build that app so that it knows to look at the following location:

/etc/projects/application.properties

To be clear, I want to avoid setting system or command line properties. I want to wire into spring the location of the file and have application server and os be unaware of how spring does that. Is this possible?

Answer 1

You can pass -Dspring.config.location=/etc/projects/application.properties as part of the JAVA_OPTS to Tomcat.

Answer 2

//edit:

I was sure that above will work, but..:)

according to documentation (here) you can create config directory next to your war/jar file, and create application.properties file there. It will be loaded. Ive tested that by cloning this repo. Edit HelloController class in initial project:

@RestController
public class HelloController {

@Value("${test.property}")
private String testProperty;

@RequestMapping("/")
public String index() {
    return "Greetings from Spring Boot! Test property value="+testProperty;
}
}

build jar with maven:

mvn clean package

create config directory, add our property there, run app:

cd target
mkdir config
echo "test.property=Value from external config" >> config/application.properties 
java -jar gs-spring-boot-0.1.0.jar

goto localhost:8080 - value from external property file should be there :)

Ofcourse if you really have to store your files on /etc/projects/ then you can create symlinks inside config dir.