Spring Boot: Is it possible to use external application.properties files in arbitrary directories with a fat jar?

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If you have not changed the defaults of Spring Boot (meaning you are using @EnableAutoConfiguration or @SpringBootApplication and have not changed any Property Source handling), then it will look for properties with the following order (highest overrides lowest):

  1. A /config subdir of the current directory
  2. The current directory
  3. A classpath /config package
  4. The classpath root

The list above is mentioned in this part of the documentation

What that means is that if a property is found for example application.properties under src/resources is will be overridden by a property with the same name found in application.properties in the /config directory that is “next” to the packaged jar.

This default order used by Spring Boot allows for very easy configuration externalization which in turn makes applications easy to configure in multiple environments (dev, staging, production, cloud etc)

To see the whole set of features provided by Spring Boot for property reading (hint: there is a lot more available than reading from application.properties) check out this part of the documentation.

As one can see from my short description above or from the full documentation, Spring Boot apps are very DevOps friendly!

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