Using Nacos as a Configuration Center for Multi‑Environment Management in Spring Cloud

This article discusses how to use Nacos as a configuration center to solve configuration management problems across different environments (development, testing, gray release, production) in a Spring Boot project.

Similar to Maven’s groupId , artifactId , and version coordinates, Nacos provides three identifiers—Namespace, Data ID, and Group—to uniquely locate a configuration set.

Three ways to separate environments are presented:

Data ID naming : include the environment name in the Data ID. Example format: ${prefix}-${spring.profiles.active}.${file-extension} When spring.profiles.active is empty, the hyphen is omitted, resulting in ${prefix}.${file-extension} .

Group separation : keep the same Data ID but assign different groups (e.g., DEV_GROUP , TEST_GROUP ) to each environment. The group can be set via the JVM argument -Dspring.cloud.nacos.config.group=DEV_GROUP .

Namespace separation : create separate namespaces for each environment (e.g., ns_dev , ns_test ) and specify the target namespace with -Dspring.cloud.nacos.config.namespace=ns_dev . This method also supports combining with profile and group arguments.

Sample project files are provided to illustrate the setup.

pom.xml (relevant dependencies): <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 https://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd"> <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion> <parent> <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId> <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId> <version>2.3.6.RELEASE</version> </parent> <groupId>com.example</groupId> <artifactId>example</artifactId> <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version> <properties> <java.version>1.8</java.version> <spring-cloud-alibaba.version>2.2.3.RELEASE</spring-cloud-alibaba.version> </properties> <dependencies> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId> <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>com.alibaba.cloud</groupId> <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-alibaba-nacos-config</artifactId> </dependency> </dependencies> <dependencyManagement> <dependencies> <dependency> <groupId>com.alibaba.cloud</groupId> <artifactId>spring-cloud-alibaba-dependencies</artifactId> <version>${spring-cloud-alibaba.version}</version> <type>pom</type> <scope>import</scope> </dependency> </dependencies> </dependencyManagement> <build> <plugins> <plugin> <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId> <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId> </plugin> </plugins> </build> </project>

bootstrap.yml (Nacos connection configuration): spring: application: name: example cloud: nacos: config: server-addr: 192.168.100.10:8848 file-extension: yaml

HelloController.java (demonstrates @RefreshScope and @Value): package com.example.controller; import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Value; import org.springframework.cloud.context.config.annotation.RefreshScope; import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.GetMapping; import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping; import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController; @RestController @RequestMapping("/hello") @RefreshScope public class HelloController { @Value("${greet.hello}") private String greet; @GetMapping("/sayHi") public String sayHi() { return greet; } }

Command‑line examples for launching the application with different environment settings:

Data ID naming (profile test): java -Dspring.profiles.active=test -jar example-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar

Group separation: java -Dspring.cloud.nacos.config.group=DEV_GROUP -jar example-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar

Namespace separation (dev): java -Dspring.cloud.nacos.config.namespace=ns_dev -jar example-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar

Combined usage (test profile, test group, test namespace): java -Dspring.profiles.active=test -Dspring.cloud.nacos.config.group=TEST_GROUP -Dspring.cloud.nacos.config.namespace=ns_test -jar example-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar

In the final summary, the author notes that while Data ID and Group methods work, they lead to many configuration files and potential permission‑management issues. Using separate namespaces provides a clear, scalable way to isolate environments and manage access control.

Reference: Nacos Documentation