Using a configuration file

Another commonly-used method of configuring Detect is to provide a configuration file. The configuration file can be a Java properties (.properties) file, or a YAML (.yml) file.

Note: Configuration files support all properties, only the formatting, as noted below, changes based on the type of configuration file employed. See All Properties.

Spring Boot will look for a configuration file named application.properties or application.yml in the current working directory, or a ./config subdirectory. If it exists, it will read property values from it.

For example, if you wanted to set property detect.project.name using a configuration (.properties) file, you could do it as follows:

echo "detect.project.name=myproject" > application.properties
bash <(curl -s -L https://detect.blackduck.com/detect12.sh) --detect.source.path=/opt/projects/project1

Because the configuration file has one of the file names that Spring looks for by default (in this case, application.properties) and exists in one of the locations that Spring looks in by default (in this case, the current directory), there is no need to specify the path to the configuration file on the command line.

Additional details can be found in the Spring Boot documentation.

Properties file

When setting a property value in a .properties file, do not prefix the property name with hyphens, and adhere to Java .properties file syntax: propertyName=propertyValue, one per line.

YAML file

When setting a property value in a .yml file, do not prefix the property name with hyphens, and adhere to YAML syntax for dictionaries: propertyName: propertyValue, one per line. There is a Detect command line help option, -hyaml, that can be used to generate a template YAML configuration file.

Running Detect from a directory that contains a file named config

If a file named config exists in the directory from which you run Detect, you must override the default value of the Spring Boot property spring.config.location so that Spring Boot does not try to read that file as a directory. If you are using a Spring Boot configuration file such as application.properties or application.yml, set the value of spring.config.location so Spring Boot will find your configration file. That is, set it to the path of the directory in which that file resides (include a trailing slash to indicate that you are specifying a directory), or to the path of the config file itself.

If you are not using a Spring Boot configuration file, set the value of spring.config.location to the empty string:

--spring.config.location=""