Profiles

When developing Spring Boot applications, it’s common to define specific configurations for different environments, such as development, test, and production. Spring Boot provides a powerful way to manage these configurations using profiles.

Frequently, developers need custom configurations when running applications in development or when running tests. This necessity has become so routine that it’s almost considered boilerplate code to define these configurations in every project.

Arconia enhances the developer experience by building on top of Spring Boot. It provides these common configurations out of the box, allowing developers to focus more on writing application logic and less on repetitive setup tasks.

By default, the Arconia Spring Boot Starter provides two profiles that are enabled automatically in certain conditions:

dev: Enabled when running the application in dev mode.
test: Enabled when running the application in test mode.

How Profiles Are Activated

Arconia activates the mode-specific profiles right before Spring Boot loads the application configuration. As a result, profile-specific configuration files (such as application-dev.yml) are loaded as part of the standard Spring Boot configuration flow, including when configuration is imported from external sources (such as Spring Cloud Config Server or HashiCorp Vault via spring.config.import).

The mode-specific profiles become active profiles. As in standard Spring Boot, activating any profile means the default profiles (spring.profiles.default) no longer apply. If you rely on spring.profiles.default, list those profiles in arconia.dev.profiles/arconia.test.profiles or disable the automatic activation.

Customizing the Profiles

Each organization may have its own set of custom profiles to manage development, test, and production configurations. For example, instead of having a dev profile, you may have a local profile where you define the configuration to use when running the application in dev mode. That’s why Arconia makes these profiles configurable.

Since the profiles must be activated before the application configuration is loaded, the profile settings cannot be defined in regular application configuration files like application.yml. They are supported in the following locations, in decreasing order of precedence:

command line arguments (e.g. --arconia.dev.profiles=local);
JVM system properties (e.g. -Darconia.dev.profiles=local);
environment variables (e.g. ARCONIA_DEV_PROFILES=local);
the META-INF/arconia-bootstrap.properties file.

If any of these properties is found in the application configuration, Arconia logs a warning at startup since the value would otherwise be silently ignored.

The Bootstrap Configuration File

For team conventions that should be checked in with the application, you can create a META-INF/arconia-bootstrap.properties file in your classpath (e.g. src/main/resources/META-INF/arconia-bootstrap.properties):

arconia.dev.profiles=local
arconia.test.profiles=integration

The file uses the Java Properties format and supports only the bootstrap settings listed on this page. It is read once, before the application configuration is loaded, so it doesn’t support placeholders or profile-specific variants. When multiple files are present, the first one found on the classpath is used: for example, a file in src/test/resources takes precedence over the one in src/main/resources when running tests. The bootstrap mode itself cannot be set in this file: the file is static and checked in with the application, whereas the mode describes the launch context.

Enabling/Disabling Profiles

The profiles are enabled by default based on the application bootstrap mode. You can disable the automatic activation via the arconia.bootstrap.profiles.enabled property, for example in the bootstrap configuration file:

arconia.bootstrap.profiles.enabled=false

Configuration Properties

Table 1. Profiles Configuration Properties
Property	Default	Description
`arconia.bootstrap.profiles.enabled`	`true`	Whether the profiles are enabled based on the application mode.
`arconia.dev.profiles`	`dev`	Names of the profiles to activate in dev mode.
`arconia.test.profiles`	`test`	Names of the profiles to activate in test mode.

Both profile properties accept a list of profiles. For example, you can define multiple profiles to be activated when running in dev mode:

arconia.dev.profiles=dev,local