Setting Spring Profile variable

I have two Spring profiles: dev and test. I want to set the active profile in the server environment, I don't want to set it in my code so that wherever I deploy my application the profile gets loaded based on the profile in the server. How can I do that?

You can simply set a system property on the server as follows...

-Dspring.profiles.active=test

Edit: To add this to tomcat in eclipse, select Run -> Run Configurations and choose your Tomcat run configuration. Click the Arguments tab and add -Dspring.profiles.active=test at the end of VM arguments. Another way would be to add the property to your catalina.properties in your Servers project, but if you add it there omit the -D

Edit: For use with Spring Boot, you have an additional choice. You can pass the property as a program argument if you prepend the property with two dashes.

Here are two examples using a Spring Boot executable jar file...

System Property

[user@host ~]$ java -jar -Dspring.profiles.active=test myproject.jar

Program Argument

[user@host ~]$ java -jar myproject.jar --spring.profiles.active=test

There are at least two ways to do that:

1. defining context param in web.xml – that breaks "one package for all environments" statement. I don't recommend that

2. defining system property -Dspring.profiles.active=your-active-profile

I believe that defining system property is a much better approach. So how to define system property for Tomcat? On the internet I could find a lot of advice like "modify catalina.sh" because you will not find any configuration file for doing stuff like that. Modifying catalina.sh is a dirty unmaintainable solution. There is a better way to do that.

Just create file setenv.sh in Tomcat's bin directory with content:

JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Dspring.profiles.active=dev"

and it will be loaded automatically during running catalina.sh start or run.

Here is a blog describing the above solution.

For Eclipse, setting -Dspring.profiles.active variable in the VM arguments should do the trick.

Go to

> Right Click Project --> Run as --> Run Configurations --> Arguments

And add your -Dspring.profiles.active=dev in the VM arguments

as System environment Variable:

Windows: Start -> type "envi" select environment variables and add a new: Name: spring_profiles_active Value: dev (or whatever yours is)

Linux: add following line to /etc/environment under PATH:

spring_profiles_active=prod (or whatever profile is)

then also export spring_profiles_active=prod so you have it in the runtime now.

For Tomcat 8:

Linux :

Create setenv.sh and update it with following:

export SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=dev

Windows:

Create setenv.bat and update it with following:

set SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=dev

In the <tomcat-home>\conf\catalina.properties file, add this new line:

spring.profiles.active=dev