Including profiles in spring boot 2.4.0 version

Question

As a developer, I use the default dev profile in my local development environment. Here is part of my application-dev.properties file:

# Profiles     spring.profiles.include=auth 

Previously I used Spring Boot 2.3.0.RELEASE and the spring.profiles.include property included auth profile at runtime.

But after I migrated to Spring Boot 2.4.0, I don't get the auth profile enabled. spring.profiles.include property doesn't seem to work as before.

Please tell me how I can configure my profiles so that I get the same result as before migration. (I would not like to use profile groups here)

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

In case your configuration processing has changed in incompatible ways and you wish to use the "legacy" processing way, you can re-enable it by setting:

spring.config.use-legacy-processing=true 

or alternatively, using YAML:

spring:   config:     use-legacy-processing: true 

which should revert the configuration processing to the 2.3.x equivalent. Do note, however, that this property exists solely to ease the migration of profile configurations from 2.3.x to 2.4.x and will likely be deprecated and removed in a future major release¹, so you should still try to migrate ASAP. To understand the reason for this change and some additional information, read on.

Of note in 2.4.0 are the following two paradigms:

So in Spring Boot 2.4 we’re planning to make two significant changes to the way the properties and YAML files are loaded:

1. Documents will be loaded in the order that they’re defined.

2. Profiles can no longer be activated from profile specific documents.

This change has in fact made the what-overrides-what-when logic considerably simpler to digest, but leads to having to disable some functionality. For example:

my.prop: test  --- spring.profiles: prodprops my.prop: prod  --- spring.profiles: prod # no longer works - activating a profile from a profile-specific document! spring.profiles.include: prodprops    

would lead to an exception as the configuration attempts to activate a profile from a profile-specific document, which is not allowed anymore.

To cover this use case (and others), profile groups have been added as a feature. This means that to enable your previous behaviour, you would need to create a profile group as follows:

spring.profiles.group.<group>=dev, auth 

or alternatively, in YAML:

spring:   profiles:     group:       <group>: dev, auth 

Where <group> is the name of your chosen profile group. Note that you can define multiple groups, all of which should have different names. If you then start your application using the <group> profile, all the profiles that are part of that group should be activated.

As a side-note, Spring Boot 2.4.0 additionally added support for multi-document properties files, which look as follows:

test=value spring.profiles.active=local #--- spring.config.activate.on-profile=dev test=overridden value 

Note the document separator (#---). This allows you to have similar overriding logic in .properties files as in .yml files.

Again, this and other information is provided in the relevant update post.

¹ If prior deprecations are any indicator, the property should be removed in 2.5.0 at the earliest or 2.6.0 at the latest, with the latter being more likely (and a deprecation as of 2.5.x).