Spring Boot app: Could not resolve placeholder in application.properties?

Question

I have a spring boot app. It works when fine when I click "run" button in SpringToolSuit4.

But when I run as "maven install", I got the error message:

<error message="Failed to load ApplicationContext" type="java.lang.IllegalStateException">java.lang.IllegalStateException: Failed to load ApplicationContext
Caused by: org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'homeController': Injection of autowired dependencies failed; nested exception is java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Could not resolve placeholder 'envVersionNum' in value "${envVersionNum}"
Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Could not resolve placeholder 'envVersionNum' in value "${envVersionNum}"
</error>

The content of my application properties:

spring.h2.console.enabled=true
spring.h2.console.path=/h2-console
spring.jpa.show-sql=true
spring.thymeleaf.cache=false
version=${envVersionNum}

If I change it to

spring.h2.console.enabled=true
spring.h2.console.path=/h2-console
spring.jpa.show-sql=true
spring.thymeleaf.cache=false
version=1.1.1

It works fine. But I want to get the envVersionNum from user, which is stored in .bash_profile (export envVersionNum= 1.1.1).

the content of pom.xml:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 https://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    <parent>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
        <version>2.2.1.RELEASE</version>
        <relativePath/> <!-- lookup parent from repository -->
    </parent>
    <groupId>com.jrp</groupId>
    <artifactId>project-management</artifactId>
    <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <name>project-management</name>
    <description>project management application</description>

    <properties>
        <java.version>1.8</java.version>
    </properties>

    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-thymeleaf</artifactId>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-devtools</artifactId>
            <scope>runtime</scope>
            <optional>true</optional>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.h2database</groupId>
            <artifactId>h2</artifactId>
            <scope>runtime</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>
            <scope>test</scope>
            <exclusions>
                <exclusion>
                    <groupId>org.junit.vintage</groupId>
                    <artifactId>junit-vintage-engine</artifactId>
                </exclusion>
            </exclusions>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>

    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
                <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>

The code of homeController:

package com.jrp.pma.controllers;

import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Map;

import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Value;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.ui.Model;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.GetMapping;

import com.fasterxml.jackson.core.JsonProcessingException;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;
import com.jrp.pma.dao.EmployeeRepository;
import com.jrp.pma.dao.ProjectRepository;
import com.jrp.pma.dto.ChartData;
import com.jrp.pma.dto.EmployeeProject;
import com.jrp.pma.entities.Project;

@Controller
public class HomeController {

    @Value("${version}")
    private String ver;

    @Autowired
    ProjectRepository proRepo;

    @Autowired
    EmployeeRepository empRepo;

    @GetMapping("/")
    public String displayHome(Model model) throws JsonProcessingException {

        model.addAttribute("versionNumber", ver);

        Map<String, Object> map = new HashMap<>();

        // we are querying the database for projects
        List<Project> projects = proRepo.findAll();
        model.addAttribute("projectsList", projects);

        List<ChartData> projectData = proRepo.getProjectStatus();

        // Lets convert projectData object into a json structure for use in javascript
        ObjectMapper objectMapper = new ObjectMapper();
        String jsonString = objectMapper.writeValueAsString(projectData);
        //[["NOTSTARTED", 1], ["INPROGRESS", 2], ["COMPLETED", 1]]
        model.addAttribute("projectStatusCnt", jsonString);

        // we are querying the database for employees
        List<EmployeeProject> employeesProjectCnt = empRepo.employeeProjects();
        model.addAttribute("employeesListProjectsCnt", employeesProjectCnt);

        return "main/home";
    }
}

Any suggestions gratefully accepted.

Answer 1

If you're setting any env variable in export command then it is visible only through the command line only.

If you're using Eclipse or any other IDE then it won't get the values from the export command because the scope of the export is inside the terminal.

Try by running your jar after exporting the variables in command line it will work.