Connection String in Azure while using Spring Boot

Question

I can see that we can define a secure connection string form portal, and than can access those variables in our application.I found many examples to do it in ASP.NET, like defining the keys in web.config. But i can not find any example focusing on accessing these connection strings defined via portal from Spring Boot app. Any help in that direction would be useful

Answer 1

See this article from Stefan: How Application Strings and Connection Strings Work in Azure App Service

Azure app service exposes them in the form of environment variables at runtime to the web app. There is a naming convention in place which makes it easier to retrieve them.

For app settings the name of the corresponding environment variable is prepended with APPSETTING_. For connection strings, it depends on the type of DB that has been configured. See below

• For SQL Azure it is SQLAZURECONNSTR_
• For SQL Database hosted on Azure VM it is SQLCONNSTR_
• For MySQL database it is MYSQLCONNSTR_
• For any other type of databases it is CUSTOMCONNSTR_

In Java, you can use the System.getenv() function to retrieve the environment variables. Refer the document on how to use this: public static String getenv(String name)

You can pass the environment variable to this function to get it working. For example

String envStr = System.getenv("APPSETTING_TestSetting");

Answer 2

If Azure exposes these secure strings as environment variables, you can name them to override application properties using the following format:

Property name my.secret.password can be overriden with environment variable MY_SECRET_PASSWORD.

You can also use them directly in your application.properties

my.secret.password=${SUPER_SECRET_ENV_VARIABLE}