Passing Command Line Arguments in Spring Boot applications

Spring Boot has a quite sophisticated environment variable and config properties management.

Using the @Value Annotation

In general terms, you can pass arguments with -DargumentName . For example:

-DargumentName="value1"

Then in your Spring Boot application, you can retrieve the value by doing:

@Value("${argumentName}") private String myVariable

Using the @Component Bean

But you can do it also in a more sophisticated way, using the @Component Bean as in the following example:

@Component
class SampleComponent {
  private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(SampleComponent.class);

  @Autowired
  public SampleComponent(ApplicationArguments args) {
    boolean option = args.containsOption("myoption");
    if (option) log.info("You have included myoption!");
    List<String> _args = args.getNonOptionArgs();
    log.info("Extra args ...");
    if (!_args.isEmpty()) _args.forEach(file -> log.info(file));
  }
}

When you execute args.containsOption(“myoption”) , it will expect the argument as follows:

$ ./mvnw spring-boot:run -Drun.arguments="--myoption"

Another possible way to pass the arguments is also like this :

$ ./mvnw spring-boot:run -Drun.arguments="arg1,arg2"

Using Spring Boot’s Environment class

Another option is to use the org.springframework.core.env.Environment to retrieve the argument. Example:

java -jar app.jar --myproperty=123

in application call:

import org.springframework.core.env.Environment;

@Autowired private Environment env;
String someProperty = env.getProperty("myproperty");