In my Spring Boot app I want to externalise the properties to run in a Docker container.  When first deployed, the properties that are currently in `my-server/src/main/resources/application.yml` are loaded and used by the application as expected.  All works fine.

However, my problem is that I need these properties to be updatable as needed, so I need access to the `application.yml` file once on the Docker container.  But at this point, it&#39;s not included in the `build/docker/` directory before running the `buildDocker` task, so won&#39;t be copied over or accessible after first deployment.

So, what I have tried is to copy the Yaml file into the `docker/` build directory, copy it to an accessible directory (`/opt/meanwhileinhell/myapp/conf`), and use the `spring.config.location` property to pass a location of the config to the Jar in my Dockerfile:

    ENTRYPOINT  [&quot;java&quot;,\
    ...
    &quot;-jar&quot;, &quot;/app.jar&quot;,\
    &quot;--spring.config.location=classpath:${configDirectory}&quot;]

Looking at the Command running on the Docker container I can see that this is as expected:

    /app.jar --spring.config.location=classpath:/opt/meanwhileinhell/myapp/conf]

However, when I update a property in this file and restart the Docker container, it isn&#39;t picking up the changes.  File permissions are:

    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root  618 Sep  5 13:59 application.yml

The [documentation][1] states: 

&gt; When custom config locations are configured, they are used in addition
&gt; to the default locations. Custom locations are searched before the
&gt; default locations.

I can&#39;t seem to figure out what I&#39;m doing wrong or misinterpreting, but probably more importantly, is this the correct way to externalise the config for this type of Docker scenario?


  [1]: https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/boot-features-external-config.html

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Externalising Spring Boot properties when deploying to Docker