Spring Boot App does not recognize environment variables in application.yml file

there. I’m new to Java Spring Boot and I’m trying to set environment variables in application.yml.

I’ve added dotenv maven dependency:

<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/io.github.cdimascio/java-dotenv -->
        <dependency>
            <groupId>io.github.cdimascio</groupId>
            <artifactId>java-dotenv</artifactId>
            <version>5.1.3</version>
        </dependency>

I’ve set variables in the .env file:

SPRING_DATABASE_URL = jdbc://db_url
SPRING_DATABASE_USERNAME = username
SPRING_DATABASE_PASSWORD = password

And in my application.yml:

spring:
    datasource:
        url: ${SPRING_DATABASE_URL}
        username: ${env.SPRING_DATABASE_USERNAME}
        password: ${env.SPRING_DATABASE_PASSWORD}

While running application I’m getting jdbc error:

java.lang.RuntimeException: Driver org.postgresql.Driver claims to not accept jdbcUrl, ${SPRING_DATABASE_URL}

I’ve tried some solutions like:

export SPRING_DATABASE_URL = jdbc://db_url

or in application.yml:

url: ${env.SPRING_DATABASE_URL}

or

url: ${env.SPRING.DATABASE.URL}

or

url: ${SPRING.DATABASE.URL}

Am I doing something wrong or missing? I appreciate your help, thank you.

Answer

I recently ran in a similar issue and wanted to set environment variables via .env with application.yml – here is what I found out:

First, as you mentioned you have to add the java-dotenv dependency to pom.xml:

<dependency>
  <groupId>io.github.cdimascio</groupId>
  <artifactId>dotenv-java</artifactId>
  <version>2.2.0</version>
</dependency>

Then create your .env file in the root of your project (where pom.xml is located) and write your environment variables like e.g. ENV_PORT=8081.

Before you can use this environment variable, you have to “bind” the content of the .env file with Spring Boot when you start the app to make it globally available. According to this thread, this can be achieved by simply altering your Main entry point of spring (where you init the framework) like so:

@SpringBootApplication
public class MySpringApplication {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        Map<String, Object> env = Dotenv.load()
                .entries()
                .stream()
                .collect(
                        Collectors.toMap(DotenvEntry::getKey, DotenvEntry::getValue));
        new SpringApplicationBuilder(MySpringApplication.class)
                .environment(new StandardEnvironment() {
                    @Override
                    protected void customizePropertySources(MutablePropertySources propertySources) {
                        super.customizePropertySources(propertySources);
                        propertySources.addLast(new MapPropertySource("dotenvProperties", env));
                    }
                }).run(args);
    }
}

That’s it, now you can reference to your environment variables in application.yml like so:

server:
  port: ${ENV_PORT}

Hope this helps! If you are interested, here is also a full working example where I am using this approach.