new relic with spring boot, how to get it to NOT use the newrelic.yml which maven downloads?

Question

The guided instrucions for new relic with spring-boot tell you to:

1. add the below to your pom
2. download newrelic.yml and add your licence key, and put the newrelic.yml in a folder called newrelic.
3. start your app like this: java -javaagent:/full/path/to/newrelic.jar -jar app.jar

Unfortunately, this does not work. We put our modified newrelic.yml into our src/main/resources/newrelic/newrelic.yml as instructed.

When we build and run the app, maven dowloads not only the jar file, it also downloads another copy of the newrelic.yml without any licence key. It puts the jar and the yml file into target/newrelic/ The problem is that when we start newrelic, it always picks up the yml file downloaded into target/newrelic.

If we edited this file, it would get lost when we do clean, and also other developers would have to manually edit the file.

How is it supposed to work?

Note, they dont give any guiance on where we are supposed to find the /full/path/to in the command line, so we guessed it should be this:

java -javaagent:C:\Users\me\dev\myproject\mymodule\target\newrelic\newrelic.jar -jar app.jar

This starts up, but gets the wrong yml config file.

We cant put the jar somewhere like /opt as we dont have access to the target servers file system directly we just deploy our self contained app.

We dont have any jars in our app - its all build using maven, which produces our single application jar which gets deployed.

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-dependency-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>3.1.1</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>unpack-newrelic</id>
            <phase>package</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>unpack-dependencies</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
                <includeGroupIds>com.newrelic.agent.java</includeGroupIds>
                <includeArtifactIds>newrelic-java</includeArtifactIds>
                <!-- you can optionally exclude files -->
                <!-- <excludes>**/newrelic.yml</excludes> -->
                <overWriteReleases>false</overWriteReleases>
                <overWriteSnapshots>false</overWriteSnapshots>
                <overWriteIfNewer>true</overWriteIfNewer>
                <outputDirectory>${project.build.directory}</outputDirectory>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>
:
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.newrelic.agent.java</groupId>
    <artifactId>newrelic-java</artifactId>
    <version>8.12.0</version>
    <scope>provided</scope>
    <type>zip</type>
</dependency>

Answer 1

By default, the New Relic Java agent will read the config file in the same folder the agent is in.

That file contains only agent default configurations. So to work around that you could:

• create a copy of the file, with the desired configurations and specify the system property newrelic.config.file. eg: java -Dnewrelic.config.file=path/to/newrelic.yml ...
• provide the configuration using system properties or environment variables. eg: java -Dnewrelic.config.license_key=MY_KEY ...