When do you use Spring profiles versus conditional configuration?

Uses profiles for named environment or deployment groups and focused conditions for feature or capability selection.

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A Spring profile activates a named group of beans or configuration, such as local development or a particular deployment mode. Conditional configuration selects beans based on a focused condition such as a property, class, existing bean, or application type. I use profiles for a small number of coherent environment groupings and conditions for a specific capability. Ordinary values such as URLs and timeouts normally belong in external configuration, not separate bean graphs.

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Configuration graph selection, environment variation, feature flags, testability, and avoidance of profile sprawl.

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Profiles select named groups of configuration; conditions express a specific fact that must be true.
A Spring profile activates a named group of beans or configuration, such as local development or a particular deployment mode. Conditional configuration selects beans based on a focused condition such as a property, class, existing bean, or application type. I use profiles for a small number of coherent environment groupings and conditions for a specific capability. Ordinary values such as URLs and timeouts normally belong in external configuration, not separate bean graphs.
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A profile named production can become a grab bag of unrelated differences and make combinations difficult to test. A property condition such as payments.mock-enabled=true states the selection more directly, but it is not automatically a runtime feature flag; the bean graph is usually decided at startup. I also avoid profiles that silently disable security or data durability outside a tightly controlled test context.

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Creating a profile for every property difference.
Treating startup conditions as dynamic feature flags.
Hiding unsafe behavior in a broadly named development profile.

When do you use Spring profiles versus conditional configuration?

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