Issue reading yml/yaml files from a spring boot app inside IntelliJ

Answered

Jairdaniel X Correasanchez

Created March 12, 2018 22:37

Hello,

I came with a very weird issue with IntelliJ, I have spent many hours now and haven't found a solution to it. I have multiple Spring Boot applications where the properties are inside an application.yml file and all of them were working completely fine. After restarting my environment, without making any change, they all started complaining about not finding the properties inside their respective yml files. The @Value Spring annotations and even the simple server.port configurations were ignored, which made me think that the issue is that the application.yml files are not being read anymore. As an experiment I added an application.properties to one of my apps and it worked! I know it is not a SpringBoot configuration issue since I can run these projects in Eclipse and they run as expected. Could you help me with this problem? I can provided any needed information anytime.

Thank you,

Daniel

19 comments

Yann Cebron

Created March 13, 2018 08:33

Official comment

"they all started complaining about not finding the properties inside their respective yml files"

Do you mean that the configuration keys are highlighted as unknown? Please verify Spring facet is configured in corresponding module and Spring Boot application context is auto-configured (do NOT setup manually).

Vanya Yarovoy

Created March 07, 2019 09:52

In my case, IDEA became able to read application.yml properties after adding

<packaging>jar</packaging>

to project's pom.xml

Jairdaniel X Correasanchez

Created March 13, 2018 14:49

Thank you for your quick response Yann. Sorry I did not give enough details on this issue. I assume the yml file is not picked up by Spring Boot because, when initializing the app, I get a BeanCreationException on one of my controller classes:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Could not resolve placeholder 'property.value' in string value "${property.value}"

This is thrown since I have @Value Spring annotation on this controller. If I comment this controller and run the app, I know the yml is still ignored because the app runs on the default port, not the one I am specifying on the file. Once I add an application.properties file, it works!

I checked my Spring Facet configurations and it is defined as Autodetected on all my projects. As I previously mentioned it earlier, I discarded a Spring Boot configuration issue since my projects run fin on another IDE. I am currently running IntelliJ IDEA 2017.1.6.

I think I am missing a configuration in IntelliJ that is causing this to happen.

Thank you in advance,

Daniel

Eric Prickett

Created August 13, 2018 00:20

I had a similar problem where I can use "mvn spring-boot:run -Dmaven.profiles.active=local" with success, but running the Application within the IDE did not work.

The solution for me was to add an Environment Variable to specify which profile to look for. Then it found my "application-local.yml" file perfectly.

Roschin Roman

Created February 08, 2019 16:04

Hi,

Just faced the same issue as topic starter: application.yml is ignored, so property placeholders cannot be injected.

I tried application.yml -> application-local.yml and those maven and environment variable mentioned above - does not work.

When I run application with 'mvn spring-boot:run' - everything is fine, when I ran from eclipse with 'Run as Java Application' - everything is fine, when I ran from Idea 'Run <Application>' - application does not start due to the issue mentioned above.

This looks like critical issue, since I cannot start\debug my application.

Any suggestions where to start?

UPD: So, this is very strange for a 'Smart IDE with Smart Spring Plugin (not free!)'. I needed to manually change 'Project compiler output' value to path where maven saves its build artifacts. Then it worked. Looks like Java + Spring Boot + Maven is such a rare combination is Java world, so the most popular IDE cannot figure it out or even give a hint.

Thank you.

Tyler Griffin

Created August 25, 2021 03:01

Simply rename the application.yml to application.yaml and it should work. IntelliJ doesn't recognise .yml

Daniel Mendozaj

Created March 26, 2019 18:54

Hi,

I have the same issue. I have a yml that declares two profiles. When I run mvn spring-boot:run or in Eclipse everything is fine and the app reads both config yml files. Then when I run it inside Idea, there is like the profiles don't exist at all (problem with placeholders, database, etc.)

I tried the solutions from Vanya and Roschin and they doesn't seem to work for me.

I appreciate any solution with this issue.

Thanks in advance.

Jason Lindholm

Created April 30, 2020 13:22

I'm facing the same issue with 2020.1. What is the issue #?

Desmond Kirrane

Created May 06, 2022 12:01

Any solution for this. I'm seeing same on IntelliJ IDEA 2022.1 (Ultimate Edition).
I've tried adding the Spring Facet to the project module setting but same story

Yann Cebron

Created March 13, 2018 14:51

Ah ok so this is a runtime issue, not an issue within the IDE.

Please double-check your YAML files are copied correctly to your output directory. Also verify the chosen module in run configuration is correct (classpath). If it still doesn't work, try running the app via Gradle/Maven targets.