How do we specify environment-specific (DEV, STAGING, PROD) properties in BloomReach?

Experience Manager (PaaS/OnPrem)
1

Hello,

I’m new to the BloomReach platform and I’m wondering if some kind individual might be able to provide me with direction on best practices for setting environment-specific properties that can then be accessed by, say, Spring beans.

This is something that can come up if we need to integrate with a third-party service provider to specify some sort of property (eg. “client.id”) whose value might differ between the DEV and STAGING environments, for example.

To illustrate more clearly, in a shared development server (eg. “DEV”), I might need to specify:

client.id=devserverclientid

And similarly in a STAGING/QA environment, I might need to use the same property name, but with a different value like so:

client.id=stagingserverclientid

Is there a standard approach to setting such environment-specific properties in BloomReach?

One approach that came to my mind was to try to add a new String property to the “/hst:hst/hst:hosts/dev-localhost” virtual host group in the CMS Console, and then define other virtual host groups for other environments (QA, UAT, PROD, whatever). However, I quickly discovered that I cannot just add any arbitrary string property to an hst:virtualhostgroup.

Any help in the matter would be very gratefully appreciated!

Thank you,
Nick

1 Like
2

Hi,
You may want to consider this [1], specially when you are developing HST components.

One of the suggested way is to drop a hst.properties file in your catalina /conf folder: once loaded, those properties can be used almost everywhere in your site application.

For each environment you can have different values in those properties files.

HTH,

Giacomo

[1] https://documentation.bloomreach.com/library/concepts/web-application/hst-2-container-configuration.html

3

Hello, Giacomo.

Firstly, thank you so much for your prompt assistance. It did help.

As an alternate approach to accessing properties within Java code, I created the following Spring configuration file in my BloomReach installation:

site/webapp/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml

In that file, I added the following line within the standard “beans” element:

<context:property-placeholder location=“classpath:site-local.properties”/>

I placed a file named “site-local.properties” in the classpath, and then added properties such as, “my.property.key=whatever”.

This enabled me to access configurable properties file values in class fields within my Java code in the following manner:

@Value("${my.property.key}")
private String clientId;

I’m not sure if the above approach is the most elegant way to do this in BloomReach, but it appears to work just fine. Note that, when I placed an hst.properties file in the /conf folder without taking steps such as those described above, I was unable to access properties values with Spring annotations such as “@Value”. But that’s fine because this approach appears to work well.

Thanks so much for the direction and inspiration!

-Nick