Creating a Spring Boot Configuration Server Using a Database

You can find many articles on the internet about creating a Spring Boot configuration server using either a file system or git repository, but this is not true for a configuration server based on a database. In this article, I am going to discuss reasons to use a database as a configuration server and demonstrate how to create it using Spring Boot.

Storing configurations on a database seems to be a better idea than storing it on either a file system or git. Because it is less trackable, it is less secure. I admit that git has security and tracking options, but they seem to be complicated for a developer. However, tracking a database table is just creating a trigger for updates, and securing a database is not an issue for a developer. Again, changing a value in a database table is just so simple and easy to commit; however, it can be a cumbersome task to make a change in a git repository.

The overall architecture is as follows:

👁 Image title

Once you have created your Spring Boot project from the Spring initializer, you need to add the following dependencies to your pom.xml file:

...

<!-- CONFIG SERVER -->
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-cloud-config-server</artifactId>
</dependency>
<!-- /CONFIG SERVER -->
<!-- JDBC -->
<dependency>
<groupId>com.github.ulisesbocchio</groupId>
<artifactId>jasypt-spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
<version>2.0.0</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-jdbc</artifactId>
<exclusions>
<exclusion>
<groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
<artifactId>tomcat-jdbc</artifactId>
</exclusion>
</exclusions>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.zaxxer</groupId>
<artifactId>HikariCP</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<!-- Your database driver dependencies here -->
</dependency>
<!-- /JDBC -->

...

Next, you will need to create a table in your database to store the configuration:

CREATE TABLE my_properties 
 ( 
 application VARCHAR(200), 
 profile VARCHAR(200), 
 label VARCHAR(200), 
 KEY VARCHAR(200), 
 value VARCHAR(200) 
 ) 

Finally, you will need to configure your configuration server with a application.yml file as shown below:

...
spring:
 cloud:
 config:
 server:
 jdbc:
 sql: SELECT KEY, VALUE from MY_PROPERTIES where APPLICATION=? and PROFILE=? and LABEL=?
 order: 1 
 datasource:
 url: <your db url here>
 driver-class-name: <your databases driver class here>
 username: <your user to database>
 password: 
 hikari:
 maximum-pool-size: 10
 connection-timeout: 5000
 profiles:
 active:
 - jdbc
...

Now, you can test your configuration server with a configuration client.

Here is a sample project.

https://github.com/dursunkoc/samplespringbootdbconfigserver