How to set active Spring profile with web parameter

Question

I'm working on a legacy Servlet app, where I'm taking Spring to help (not Spring MVC). The Spring configuration is working fine at the moment and I can set the active profile either by command line or programmatically. This blog post states that the active Spring profile can be set as a web parameter also. However, I'm unable to make this option work.

I've simply tried to make a request to the servlet as localhost://foo?spring.profiles.active=foo , but this does not work as expected.

What is the correct way of passing the web parameter for the active Spring profile? Is this something Spring MVC specific?

Answer 1

Spring needs to know the profile when the application context is being constructed - ie during web application startup. The Web parameter method refers to context parameter set via web.xml :

<context-param>
    <param-name>spring.profiles.active</param-name>
    <param-value>development</param-value>
</context-param>