How do I set the default Spring Boot profile for running tests (without using environment variables)?

Question

I have a Spring Boot project, using gradle, with three Spring profiles:

• "development" (for when I'm developing)
• "test" (for when I'm running tests)
• "production" (for when it is deployed in production [to heroku])

I therefore have four application*.yml files:

• application.yml (contains all the shared defaults)
• application-development.yml
• application-test.yml
• application-production.yml

These environments all work fine. The problem is that when I deploy the code to heroku, heroku runs 'gradle build' (which in turn runs 'gradle test'), and heroku does not have an option of setting an environment variable. Therefore I cannot set an active profile. So when it runs the tests it is using application.yml without the overrides in application-test.yml. So therefore the tests obviously fail.

My only solution so far is to put all the application-test.yml defaults into application.yml, and then override them again in the other profiles, but this is obviously far from ideal.

Is there a way to:

• set the active Spring profile from within gradle (note that I don't have edit access to the 'test' or 'build' tasks as they come from the 'spring boot gradle plugin')?
• or is there a way in Spring Boot to set the default active Spring profile when tests are run?

Answer 1

Think joshiste's answer is the correct one.

Anyway I'd guess you also could set the SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE environment variable like so:

 $ heroku config:set SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=test
 Adding config vars and restarting myapp... done, v12
 SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE: test

 $ heroku config
 SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE: test

 $ heroku config:get SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE
 test

 $ heroku config:unset SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE
 Unsetting SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE and restarting myapp... done, v13

Answer 2

In case you are using the @WebIntegrationTest or @IntegrationTest you can set the profiles as property value with the annotation.

Looks like this:

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
@WebIntegrationTest({"spring.profiles.active=test"})
public class MyWebIntegrationTests {
    // ...
}