advancedTop 100 Interview Questions

How should environment-specific configuration (dev/staging/prod) be handled for a single containerized Spring Boot image?

Build one immutable image and inject environment-specific configuration externally at runtime via environment variables or Spring profiles activated by an environment variable (`SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE`), rather than baking environment-specific config into separate images per environment — this preserves the 'build once, deploy anywhere' principle.

Ready to master this question?

Generate a complete walkthrough — background, the full answer in plain language, a working code example explained line by line, a real-world scenario, common mistakes, and how this same question gets asked in different ways.

Next Step

Continue to Why is rebuilding the entire fat jar layer on every code change, even with multi-stage builds, still a cache-efficiency problem? →← Back to all Docker questions