How to Load Multiple Nacos Configurations and Share Them in Spring Cloud

In previous articles we introduced how to create configuration content in Nacos, the mapping between Nacos configuration and Spring application configuration, and multi‑environment configuration management.

When an application needs to split configuration into multiple files (e.g., actuator.properties and log.properties) for sharing, Nacos can load them together. The loading is controlled by three parameters: spring.cloud.nacos.config.prefix, spring.cloud.nacos.config.file-extension, and spring.cloud.nacos.config.group.

Loading multiple configurations

By default Spring Cloud loads the configuration whose data‑id is ${spring.application.name}.properties in the DEFAULT_GROUP.

To load additional files we create two Data‑ID entries in Nacos ( actuator.properties and log.properties) with the same group, then configure the ext-config property in the Spring application:

spring.cloud.nacos.config.ext-config[0].data-id=actuator.properties
spring.cloud.nacos.config.ext-config[0].group=DEFAULT_GROUP
spring.cloud.nacos.config.ext-config[0].refresh=true

spring.cloud.nacos.config.ext-config[1].data-id=log.properties
spring.cloud.nacos.config.ext-config[1].group=DEFAULT_GROUP
spring.cloud.nacos.config.ext-config[1].refresh=true

The ext-config list is an array; each element contains data-id, group and refresh. The refresh flag enables automatic refresh for the extra configuration.

Shared configuration

Nacos also provides a shortcut to load several shared configurations at once:

spring.cloud.nacos.config.shared-dataids=actuator.properties,log.properties
spring.cloud.nacos.config.refreshable-dataids=actuator.properties,log.properties

When the same key exists in multiple configurations, the loading order is A < B < C, where A is shared‑dataids, B is ext‑config, and C is the default configuration.

Reference

Nacos official documentation

Code example

The full example can be found in the repository:

GitHub: https://github.com/dyc87112/SpringCloud-Learning/

Gitee: https://gitee.com/didispace/SpringCloud-Learning/