Loading Properties from external location

Question

Using springboot 3.1.5 and I need to keep .properties files external to the jar so I am starting my app with

java -jar --spring.config.location=file:path/to/directory/

this finds application.properties without an issue. But if I add another.properties file to the same directory, spring does not load that file. How can I tell Spring to load all the .properties files in that directory without having to list them all manually

Regards

Answer 1

You can import them programmatically via main method and set them into spring.config.import, this is a demonstration.

@SpringBootApplication
public class ServiceParentApplication {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Arrays.stream(args)
            .filter(arg -> arg.startsWith("--spring.config.location=file:")) // Incase you read folder application.properties via args
            .map(arg -> arg.replace("--spring.config.location=file:", ""))
            .findFirst()
            .ifPresent(folder -> {
                try (Stream<Path> paths = Files.walk(Paths.get(folder))) {
                    var importFiles = paths
                        .filter(Files::isRegularFile)
                        .map(file -> file.toString())
                        .filter(fileName -> fileName.endsWith("properties") || fileName.endsWith("properties") && !fileName.endsWith("application.properties"))
                            .map(fileName -> "optional:file:" + fileName)
                            .collect(Collectors.joining(";"));
                    System.setProperty("spring.config.import", importFiles);
                } catch (IOException e) {
                    throw new RuntimeException(e);
                }
            });

        SpringApplication.run(ServiceParentApplication.class, args);
    }

Here is the document for Optional Locations . Also, if you don't use .properties file as the additional import, you can prefer configuration tree to import each file for each variable.

Thank you @seenukarthi for the suggestion that I refer to build this.