In this tutorial we are going to learn about the difference between writing a property on application.yml or bootstrap.yml in spring boot.

application.yml

application.yml/application.properties file is specific to Spring Boot applications. Unless you change the location of external properties of an application, spring boot will always load application.yml from the following location:

/src/main/resources/application.yml

You can store all the external properties for your application in this file. Common properties that are available in any Spring Boot project can be found at: https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/common-application-properties.html You can customize these properties as per your application needs. Sample file is shown below:

spring:
    application:
        name: foobar
    datasource:
        driverClassName: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
        url: jdbc:mysql://localhost/test
server:
    port: 9000

bootstrap.yml

bootstrap.yml on the other hand is specific to spring-cloud-config and is loaded before the application.yml

bootstrap.yml is only needed if you are using Spring Cloud and your microservice configuration is stored on a remote Spring Cloud Config Server.

Important points about bootstrap.yml

When used with Spring Cloud Config server, you shall specify the application-name and config git location using below properties.

spring.application.name: "application-name"
spring.cloud.config.server.git.uri: "git-uri-config"

When used with microservices (other than cloud config server), we need to specify the application name and location of config server using below properties

spring.application.name: 
spring.cloud.config.uri: 

This properties file can contain other configuration relevant to Spring Cloud environment for e.g. eureka server location, encryption/decryption related properties.

Upon startup, Spring Cloud makes an HTTP(S) call to the Spring Cloud Config Server with the name of the application and retrieves back that application’s configuration.

application.yml contains the default configuration for the microservice and any configuration retrieved (from cloud config server) during the bootstrap process will override configuration defined in application.yml