7. Serving Plain Text

Instead of using the Environment abstraction (or one of the alternative representations of it in YAML or properties format) your applications might need generic plain text configuration files, tailored to their environment. The Config Server provides these through an additional endpoint at /{name}/{profile}/{label}/{path} where "name", "profile" and "label" have the same meaning as the regular environment endpoint, but "path" is a file name (e.g. log.xml ). The source files for this endpoint are located in the same way as for the environment endpoints: the same search path is used as for properties or YAML files, but instead of aggregating all matching resources, only the first one to match is returned.

After a resource is located, placeholders in the normal format ( ${…} ) are resolved using the effective Environment for the application name, profile and label supplied. In this way the resource endpoint is tightly integrated with the environment endpoints. Example, if you have this layout for a GIT (or SVN) repository:

application.yml
nginx.conf

where nginx.conf looks like this:

server {
    listen              80;
    server_name         ${nginx.server.name};
}

and application.yml like this:

nginx:
  server:
    name: example.com
---
spring:
  profiles: development
nginx:
  server:
    name: develop.com

then the /foo/default/master/nginx.conf resource looks like this:

server {
    listen              80;
    server_name         example.com;
}

and /foo/development/master/nginx.conf like this:

server {
    listen              80;
    server_name         develop.com;
}

Just like the source files for environment configuration, the "profile" is used to resolve the file name, so if you want a profile-specific file then /*/development/*/logback.xml will be resolved by a file called logback-development.xml (in preference to logback.xml ).

If you do not want to supply the label and let the server use the default label, you can supply a useDefaultLabel request parameter. So, the above example for the default profile could look like /foo/default/nginx.conf?useDefaultLabel .