Enforce different settings depending on buildstage

Question

I'm adding unit-tests to an existing codebase, and the application itself retrieves data from a server through REST. The URL to the server is hard-coded in the application.

However, developers are obviously not testing new features, bugs, etc on a live environment, but rather on a development-server. To acomplish this, the developement-build have a different "server-url"-string than the production-build.

During developement a non-production-url should be enforced; and when creating a production build, a production-url should be inforced instead.

I'm looking for advice on how to implement a neat solution for this, since missing to change the url can currently have devastating outcomes.

A maven build script only tests the production-value, and not both. I haven't found any way to make build-specific unit-tests (Technologies used: Java, Git, Git-flow, Maven, JUnit)

Answer 1

Application configuration is an interesting topic. What you've pointed out here as an issue is definitely a very practical need, but even more so, if you need to repackage (and possibly build) between different environments, how do you truly know that what you've got there is the same that was actually tested and verified.

So load the configuration from a resource outside of the application package. Java option to a file on filesystem or a JNDI resource are both good options. You can also have defaults for the development by commiting a config file and reading from there if the Java option is not specified.