Allow spring.profiles.active in a config file to take effect when spring.profiles.include is configured via a higher-precedence property source

[facugaich]

Spring Boot version: 2.1.0.RELEASE

Summary: Setting spring.profiles.active in application.properties has no effect if system property spring.profiles.include or env var SPRING_PROFILES_INCLUDE is also set.

How to reproduce, using demo project from initializr:

application.properties
spring.profiles.active=active

Run with:
./mvnw -Dspring.profiles.include=include spring-boot:run

Expected:
The following profiles are active: include,active

But got:
The following profiles are active: include

I have also tested that the profile specific application-active.properties is not being loaded into the environment.

Setting active profiles in system properties seems to work:
./mvnw -Dspring.profiles.active=active -Dspring.profiles.include=include spring-boot:run

Output:
The following profiles are active: include,active

[philwebb]

This is actually behaving as I would expect. The spring.profiles.active entry in your application.properties will only apply if no other profiles have been activated. When you use -Dspring.profiles.include=include this is setting a system property that will be evaluated before the application.properties file is loaded. Since the system property has activated the include profile, the spring.profiles.active property will not be used.

[facugaich]

@philwebb Thank you

Isn't this behaviour at odds with the documentation on Profiles? More specifically:

The spring.profiles.active property follows the same ordering rules as other properties: The highest PropertySource wins. This means that you can specify active profiles in application.properties and then replace them by using the command line switch.

Sometimes, it is useful to have profile-specific properties that add to the active profiles rather than replace them. The spring.profiles.include property can be used to unconditionally add active profiles.

In a sense, they are being replaced by the higher priority spring.profiles.include property

[philwebb]

I agree that the behavior is a little unexpected. I've reopened this one to see if we can improve things in 2.2.