Spring Boot yaml configuration for a list of strings

From the spring boot docs https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/boot-features-external-config.html

YAML lists are represented as property keys with [index] dereferencers, for example this YAML:

my:
   servers:
       - dev.bar.com
       - foo.bar.com

Would be transformed into these properties:

my.servers[0]=dev.bar.com
my.servers[1]=foo.bar.com

To bind to properties like that using the Spring DataBinder utilities (which is what @ConfigurationProperties does) you need to have a property in the target bean of type java.util.List and you either need to provide a setter, or initialize it with a mutable value, e.g. this will bind to the properties above. Here is what the question's code would look like.

@ConfigurationProperties(prefix="ignore")
public class Filenames {

    private List<String> ignoredFilenames = new ArrayList<String>();

    public List<String> getFilenames() {
        return this.ignoredFilenames;
    }
}

use comma separated values in application.yml

ignoreFilenames: .DS_Store, .hg

java code for access

@Value("${ignoreFilenames}")    
String[] ignoreFilenames

It is working ;)

My guess is, that the @Value can not cope with "complex" types. You can go with a prop class like this:

@Component
@ConfigurationProperties('ignore')
class IgnoreSettings {
    List<String> filenames
}

Please note: This code is Groovy - not Java - to keep the example short! See the comments for tips how to adopt.

See the complete example https://github.com/christoph-frick/so-springboot-yaml-string-list