Aspectran Profiles

Aspectran’s Profiles feature is a powerful function that allows you to enable or disable all or part of an application’s configuration only in a specific environment. For example, it can be usefully employed when you need to apply different database settings or load specific beans for ‘development’, ‘test’, and ‘production’ environments.

Activating Profiles

Profiles can be easily activated through JVM System Properties. The main properties used are as follows:

aspectran.profiles.active: Specifies the currently active profiles. If specifying multiple profiles, separate them with a comma (,).
aspectran.profiles.default: Specifies the default profile to be activated if aspectran.profiles.active is not specified.
aspectran.profiles.base: Specifies the base profile that should always be active.

Examples:

Here is a command-line example for running an application with the dev profile activated.

java -Daspectran.profiles.active=dev -jar my-application.jar

Here is an example of activating two profiles, prod and metrics, simultaneously.

java -Daspectran.profiles.active=prod,metrics -jar my-application.jar

Conditional Configuration with Profiles

In most elements within Aspectran’s configuration file (XML-based), you can use the profile attribute to apply that setting only when a specific profile is active.

The profile attribute can be used in various configuration elements such as <bean>, <arguments>, <properties>, <environment>, and <append>.
If the profile expression specified in the profile attribute matches the currently active profile, the corresponding element is activated.
If it does not match, that element and all its child elements are ignored.

<aspectran>

    <!-- Properties applied only when the 'dev' profile is active -->
    <properties profile="dev">
        <property name="db.driver">org.h2.Driver</property>
        <property name="db.url">jdbc:h2:mem:testdb</property>
        <property name="db.username">sa</property>
        <property name="db.password"></property>
    </properties>

    <!-- Properties applied only when the 'prod' profile is active -->
    <properties profile="prod">
        <property name="db.driver">com.mysql.cj.jdbc.Driver</property>
        <property name="db.url">jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/prod_db</property>
        <property name="db.username">prod_user</property>
        <property name="db.password">prod_password</property>
    </properties>

    <!-- Include this configuration file only when the 'prod' profile is active -->
    <append file="/config/metrics-context.xml" profile="prod"/>

</aspectran>

Profile Expressions

In addition to simple profile names, you can use logical operators to express complex conditions.

! (NOT): When a specific profile is not active

<!-- Applied only when the 'demo' profile is not active -->
<bean id="someBean" class="com.example.SomeBean" profile="!demo"/>

() (AND): When all profiles within the parentheses are active

<!-- Applied only when both 'prod' and 'metrics' profiles are active -->
<bean id="metricsExporter" class="com.example.MetricsExporterBean" profile="(prod, metrics)"/>

[] (OR): When at least one of the profiles within the square brackets is active (separating with a comma , also works as OR)

<!-- Applied when either 'dev' or 'test' profile is active -->
<bean id="testHelper" class="com.example.TestHelperBean" profile="[dev, test]"/>

Composite Expressions: You can create complex conditions by combining multiple operators.

<!-- Applied when none of the 'rss-lettuce', 'rss-lettuce-masterreplica', 'rss-lettuce-cluster' profiles are active -->
<properties profile="(!rss-lettuce, !rss-lettuce-masterreplica, !rss-lettuce-cluster)">
    <!-- ... -->
</properties>

Usage Example: Environment-specific Database Configuration

Here is a complete example of setting different database connection information according to dev and prod environments.

config/root-context.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<aspectran>

    <description>Loads different DB settings depending on the environment.</description>

    <!-- Development environment settings -->
    <properties profile="dev">
        <property name="db.driver">org.h2.Driver</property>
        <property name="db.url">jdbc:h2:mem:devdb;DB_CLOSE_DELAY=-1</property>
        <property name="db.username">sa</property>
        <property name="db.password"></property>
    </properties>

    <!-- Production environment settings -->
    <properties profile="prod">
        <property name="db.driver">com.mysql.cj.jdbc.Driver</property>
        <property name="db.url">jdbc:mysql://prod.db.server:3306/main_db</property>
        <property name="db.username">prod_db_user</property>
        <property name="db.password">!PROD_DB_PASSWORD!</property>
    </properties>

    <!-- Data source bean definition -->
    <bean id="dataSource" class="com.zaxxer.hikari.HikariDataSource">
        <properties>
            <item name="driverClassName" value="${db.driver}"/>
            <item name="jdbcUrl" value="${db.url}"/>
            <item name="username" value="${db.username}"/>
            <item name="password" value="${db.password}"/>
        </properties>
    </bean>

</aspectran>

Running the Application:

Run in development environment: Activating the dev profile uses the H2 in-memory database.
```
java -Daspectran.profiles.active=dev -jar my-app.jar
```
Run in production environment: Activating the prod profile uses the MySQL database.
```
java -Daspectran.profiles.active=prod -jar my-app.jar
```

By using Aspectran’s Profiles feature, you can easily respond to multiple environments just by changing the configuration without any code changes.