4. Serving Plain Text

Instead of using the Environment abstraction (or one of the alternative representations of it in YAML or properties format), your applications might need generic plain-text configuration files that are tailored to their environment. The Config Server provides these through an additional endpoint at /{name}/{profile}/{label}/{path}, where name, profile, and label have the same meaning as the regular environment endpoint, but path is a file name (such as log.xml). The source files for this endpoint are located in the same way as for the environment endpoints. The same search path is used for properties and YAML files. However, instead of aggregating all matching resources, only the first one to match is returned.

After a resource is located, placeholders in the normal format (${…​}) are resolved by using the effective Environment for the supplied application name, profile, and label. In this way, the resource endpoint is tightly integrated with the environment endpoints. Consider the following example for a GIT or SVN repository:

application.yml
nginx.conf

where nginx.conf looks like this:

server {
    listen              80;
    server_name         ${nginx.server.name};
}

and application.yml like this:

nginx:
  server:
    name: example.com
---
spring:
  profiles: development
nginx:
  server:
    name: develop.com

The /foo/default/master/nginx.conf resource might be as follows:

server {
    listen              80;
    server_name         example.com;
}

and /foo/development/master/nginx.conf like this:

server {
    listen              80;
    server_name         develop.com;
}

	Note
	As with the source files for environment configuration, the profile is used to resolve the file name. So, if you want a profile-specific file, /*/development/*/logback.xml can be resolved by a file called logback-development.xml (in preference to logback.xml).

	Note
	If you do not want to supply the label and let the server use the default label, you can supply a useDefaultLabel request parameter. So, the preceding example for the default profile could be /foo/default/nginx.conf?useDefaultLabel.