Multiple Spring Properties with Lists

2 minute read

Say you have multiple configuration files you want to use to when starting the application. One with some general settings shared by multiple instances and one with specific to this instance:

general.yaml:

configuration:

    servers:

      - name: "My awesome server"

      - password: "Very secret"

app.yaml:

configuration:

   name: awesome-app

With @ConfigurationProperties you can automatically bind this configuration to a POJO:

@Configuration
@ConfigurationProperties("configuration")
public class Config {
  private String name;
  private List<Server> servers = new ArrayList<>();
  public String getName() {
    return name;
  }
  public void setName(String name) {
    this.name = name;
  }
  public List<Server> getServers() {
    return servers;
  }
  public void setServers(List<Server> servers) {
    this.servers = servers;
  }
  public static class Server {
    private String password;
    private String name;
    public String getPassword() {
      return password;
    }
    public void setPassword(String password) {
      this.password = password;
    }
    public String getName() {
      return name;
    }
    public void setName(String name) {
      this.name = name;
    }
  }
}

Starting the app with these two configuration files is simply a matter of adding them to the spring.config.location list:

 java -Dspring.config.location=~/general.yaml,~/app.yaml my.app.app.AppApplication

Done and done! Off to the races.

Lists in Multiple Files

Let’s say you would like to have something like this:

general.yaml:

configuration:

   servers: 

   - name: http://some.server

   - name: http://second.server

Then you have another file that that contains the passwords, perhaps generated from a key vault or something:

secrets.yaml:

configuration:

   servers: 

   - password: mysecret

   - password: second-password

Depending on the order/priority, either the name or the password will be null. Dang. Sadly this doesn’t work (as per doc):

When a List is specified in multiple profiles, the one with the highest priority (and only that one)

So what now? Well you can rethink your design decisions do this some other way.

You still want to do this? Well one way would be to disable @ConfigurationProperties, merge the multiple configuration sources into a single PropertySource and feed that to the Binder manually.

Ok let’s first create a method that does the binding and merging for a generic prefix:

  public static <T> T bindClassFromAllProperties(Class<T> klass, ConfigurableEnvironment env, String prefix) {
    // Take all properties that start with out prefix 

    Set<String> keys = StreamSupport
        .stream(env.getPropertySources().spliterator(), false)
        .filter(ps -> ps instanceof EnumerablePropertySource)
        .map(ps -> ((EnumerablePropertySource) ps).getPropertyNames())
        .flatMap(Arrays::stream)
        .filter(propName -> propName.startsWith(prefix))
        .collect(Collectors.toSet());
    Properties properties = new Properties();
    // Take the value with out keys from env, this will preserve priorities

    keys.forEach(key -> properties.put(key, Objects.requireNonNull(env.getProperty(key))));
    ConfigurationPropertySource propertySource = new MapConfigurationPropertySource(properties);
    return new Binder(propertySource).bind(prefix, klass).get();
  }

So now we can use this in a @Bean definition:

  @Bean
  public Config loadConfig(ConfigurableEnvironment env,
      ApplicationContext context) {
    return bindClassFromAllProperties(Config.class, env, "configuration");
  }

Now just remove @Configuration and @ConfigurationProperties annotations from your configuration class so the bean is used to create the Config object.

Tagged under: spring java

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