How to externalize Spring Boot application.properties to tomcat/lib folder

Question

I need a configuration free, deployable war, myapp1.war that can retrieve the configuration files from the tomcat/lib folder. As I have other web applications coexisting on

Answer 1

With Spring 4.2 and @Annotation config and tomcat on linux serveur

In your Application class set the @PropertySource like that :

@Configuration
@EnableWebMvc
@PropertySource(value = { "classpath:application-yourapp.properties"})
@ComponentScan(basePackages = "com.yourapp")
public class YourAppWebConfiguration extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {

    ...
}

Now you just need to include the property file in your classpath

In production

Deploy your .war files ( or anything ) on tomcat, and put your application-yourapp.properties anyway on your production machine. ( for exemple in /opt/applyconfigfolder/application-yourapp.properties" )

Then in your tomcat ( here tomcat 7 ) open bin\catalina.sh

You have this line

# Ensure that any user defined CLASSPATH variables are not used on startup,
# but allow them to be specified in setenv.sh, in rare case when it is needed.
CLASSPATH=

Just add the path of the folder which contains application.properties

CLASSPATH=:/opt/applyconfigfolder

If you have already some classpath define you can add it

CLASSPATH=:/opt/applyconfigfolder:/yourpath1:/yourpath2:

I haven't try with windows but I think there is no problem

In Dev ( with eclipse )

├src
| └main
|   └ ....
└config
| └application-yourapp.properties

instead of src/main/resources/application-yourapp.properties

Now in eclipse add your config folder to classpath, go to "Run Configurations" of your tomcat server ( or equivalent ) and add the folder Config to User Entries

Ok that's it, your application.properties is out of the application and your project run perfectly in dev environment.