Developing Java Applications with Spring and Spring Boot

Externalizing an environmental config using JSON

We have looked at a number of different ways to externally add or override the values of specific properties, either by using environment variables, system properties, or command-line arguments. All those options provide us with a great deal of flexibility, but with the exception of external property files, are all limited to setting one property at a time. When it comes to using property files, the syntax is not exactly the best at representing nested, hierarchical data structures, and can get a bit tricky. To avoid this situation, Spring Boot provides us with an ability to also pass, externally, JSON-encoded content containing an entire config hierarchy of settings.

In this recipe, we will ...