In this article, we will create a DEV profile and PROD profile to enable environment-specific configuration properties. If no profile is specified, the default will be used. Each time the app is built, the developer can specify which profile to use. A profile in Spring Boot can be thought of as a context that defines a specific set of app settings, variables, and behaviors. However, usually some customization is necessary and oftentimes we need environment specific customization. This means that the vast majority of app configurations use sensible default values that can be overridden when necessary, but in general a Spring Boot app will work out of the box with no custom configuration required. One of the core design principles behind Spring Boot is that it encourages convention over configuration.
I use this method for my website, Initial Commit, which is built using Spring Boot, the Thymeleaf template engine, and is hosted on AWS Elastic Beanstalk. In order to demonstrate how profiles work, we'll visit an example using Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager for tracking site metrics. This article applies to sites created with the Spring Boot framework, using Apache Maven as the build tool.
