Mastering Service Naming and Environment Configuration with Mica-Launcher

Preface

In micro‑service development, conventions are often more important than code. The mica-launcher customizes service name and environment handling, making development faster and more convenient.

Service Name Conventions

A good service name should be self‑explanatory. Two‑level naming for small teams (e.g., user-api) and three‑level naming for multiple teams (e.g., mica-user-api) where the first level is the team name.

Level 1: Team name (for multi‑team)

Level 2: Service name

Level 3: Service type

Environment Division

Vision

The launcher’s mission is to allow a JAR to start in any environment without excessive configuration, reducing learning cost and enabling rapid onboarding.

Environments

dev (development), test (testing), ontest (online testing), prod (production). Default is dev.

Environment Variable Configuration

Background Story

The initial prototype of mica-launcher appeared in JFinal projects to handle Jetty during development and Tomcat in production. It was later redesigned for Spring Boot to simplify service environment handling.

Using mica-launcher

Compared with the native Spring Boot launcher, mica-launcher adds a mandatory service‑name parameter, which is crucial in micro‑services.

Maven

<dependency>
    <groupId>net.dreamlu</groupId>
    <artifactId>mica-launcher</artifactId>
</dependency>

Gradle

implementation "net.dreamlu:mica-launcher"

Example Spring Boot entry point:

@SpringBootApplication
public class MicaExampleApplication {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        MicaApplication.run("mica-example", MicaExampleApplication.class, args);
    }
}

Note: When using mica-launcher, combine it with mica-test for unit testing.

Automated Configuration

Inject MicaProperties to read variables such as env or custom mica.prop entries defined in configuration files.

mica.env (default dev) – read‑only environment variable.

mica.is-local (default false) – indicates local development.

mica.prop – custom properties prefixed with mica.prop..

Custom configuration example

mica:
  prop:
    site-name: 如梦技术
    site-url: https://www.dreamlu.net

Reading configuration

@Autowired
private MicaProperties properties;

public boolean savePost() {
    String siteName = properties.get("site-name");
    String siteUrl = properties.get("site-url");
    // ...
}

Launcher Plugin Extension

The launcher can load extensions such as mica-log4j2 via Java SPI.

LauncherService Interface

/**
 * Launcher extension for component discovery
 */
public interface LauncherService {
    /**
     * Process SpringApplicationBuilder during startup
     */
    void launcher(SpringApplicationBuilder builder, Environment env,
                 String appName, String profile, boolean isLocalDev);
}

SPI file

Place a file at META-INF/services/net.dreamlu.mica.launcher.LauncherService containing the fully qualified class name of the implementation, e.g., net.dreamlu.mica.log.LogLauncherServiceImpl.

Best Practices

Use the predefined environment variable ${mica.env} as a placeholder in configuration files, allowing domain names to be switched per environment.

Example domain configuration

config-dev.dreamlu.vip
config-test.dreamlu.vip
...

Spring Cloud Config example

spring:
  cloud:
    consul:
      host: https://config-${mica.env}.dreamlu.vip
      port: 8500
      config:
        format: yaml

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