How do I activate a Spring Boot profile when running from IntelliJ?

If you actually make use of spring boot run configurations (currently only supported in the Ultimate Edition) it's easy to pre-configure the profiles in "Active Profiles" setting.

Spring Boot seems had changed the way of reading the VM options as it evolves. Here's some way to try when you launch an application in Intellij and want to active some profile:

1. Change VM options

Open "Edit configuration" in "Run", and in "VM options", add: -Dspring.profiles.active=local

It actually works with one project of mine with Spring Boot v2.0.3.RELEASE and Spring v5.0.7.RELEASE, but not with another project with Spring Boot v2.1.1.RELEASE and Spring v5.1.3.RELEASE.

Also, when running with Maven or JAR, people mentioned this:

mvn spring-boot:run -Drun.profiles=dev

or

java -jar -Dspring.profiles.active=dev XXX.jar

(See here: how to use Spring Boot profiles)

2. Passing JVM args

It is mentioned somewhere, that Spring changes the way of launching the process of applications if you specify some JVM options; it forks another process and will not pass the arg it received so this does not work. The only way to pass args to it, is:

mvn spring-boot:run -Dspring-boot.run.jvmArguments="..."

Again, this is for Maven. https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/maven-plugin/examples/run-debug.html

3. Setting (application) env var

What works for me for the second project, was setting the environment variable, as mentioned in some answer above: "Edit configuration" - "Environment variable", and:

SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=local

I added -Dspring.profiles.active=test to VM Options and then re-ran that configuration. It worked perfectly.

This can be set by

• Choosing Run | Edit Configurations...
• Go to the Configuration tab
• Expand the Environment section to reveal VM options