Spring Boot provides a lot of flexibility in externalizing configuration properties via properties or YAML files. We can also configure properties for each environment (dev, qa, prod, etc.) separately using profile-specific configuration files such as application.properties, application-dev.properties, application-prod.properties, etc. But once the application is started, we cannot update the properties at runtime. If we change the properties, we need to restart the application to use the updated configuration properties.

Test

Spring Cloud Config Server enables centralized configuration management for microservices. The tutorial walks through setting up a Git-backed config repository, creating a Spring Cloud Config Server with @EnableConfigServer, and configuring a client service (catalog-service) to fetch properties via bootstrap.properties. It covers profile-specific configs (dev/prod), property precedence rules, and runtime config refresh using @RefreshScope and the /refresh actuator endpoint. The post notes that manual refresh is impractical at scale and previews Spring Cloud Bus as the solution.

Spring Cloud Tutorials – Introduction to Spring Cloud Config Server