In this tutorial we are going to learn about setting the active profile and config location from command line in a spring boot application.

The best practice is to define this as a VM “-D” argument. Please note the differences between spring boot 1.x and 2.x.

The profiles to enable can be specified on the command line:

Spring-Boot 2.x (works only with maven)

-Dspring-boot.run.profiles=local

Spring-Boot 1.x

-Dspring.profiles.active=local

example usage with maven:

Spring-Boot 2.x

mvn spring-boot:run -Dspring-boot.run.profiles=local

Spring-Boot 1.x and 2.x

mvn spring-boot:run -Dspring.profiles.active=local

Make sure to separate them with a comma for multiple profiles:

mvn spring-boot:run -Dspring.profiles.active=local,foo,bar
mvn spring-boot:run -Dspring-boot.run.profiles=local,foo,bar

OR

There are two different ways you can add/override spring properties on the command line.

Option 1: Java System Properties (VM Arguments) It’s important that the -D parameters are before your application.jar otherwise they are not recognized.

java -jar -Dspring.profiles.active=prod application.jar

Option 2: Program arguments

java -jar application.jar --spring.profiles.active=prod --spring.config.location=c:\config