Environment Specific Configuration

Overview

Elastic Path Commerce supports defining different application configuration values for each deployed environment. Configuration is either stored in the Commerce database or provided via configuration files.

Configuration values stored in the Commerce database can be defined using Import/Export XML files and include:

• System settings
• Payment gateway configuration

Files based configuration includes:

• Cortex property files
• Overrides to application Spring configuration files
• Cache configuration

Defining Environment Configurations

Review the environment directories and the configuration files.

Environment Directories

The extensions/database/ext-data/src/main/resources/environments directory contains application configuration directories for each of your deployed environments, e.g. ci, qa, stage-author, stage-live, prod-author and prod-live. These are called environment directories.

Default Environment Directory

The environments/default directory contains files that are used in all environments, unless they are overwritten by files with the same name in a specific environment directory.

Data Population Configuration Files

The following files in the root of an environment directory are used to provide environment-specific configuration to the Data Population Tool.

File	Purpose	Owned By
data-population-properties	Defines the data to be processed by the Data Population Tool for the current environment.	Dev team
filtering.properties	Supplies property overrides for non-secret placeholders defined in Liquibase and Import/Export files.	Dev team
secure-filtering.properties	Supplies property overrides for secret placeholders defined in Liquibase and Import/Export files.	Dev team (non-prod) / Ops team (prod)

Application Configuration Files

The files/conf/ subdirectory in an environment folder contains application configuration files. The files are accessible at runtime in the /ep/conf/ directory.

Development teams are free to add any required files or directories to files/conf/.

Managing Secrets

As described above, most configuration values are stored in the ep-commerce source code repo. However, it is generally considered bad practice to store sensitive values such as credentials, API keys, or certificate files in an unencrypted source code repository.

For that reason, it is recommended that sensitive production values be stored separately, and retrieved by the Docker containers at startup.

The recommended best practices are:

• Non-sensitive values for all environments are stored in the ep-commerce source code repo within the extensions/database/ext-data/src/main/resources/environments directory.
• Sensitive values for non-production environments are stored in the ep-commerce source code repo within the extensions/database/ext-data/src/main/resources/environments directory.
• Sensitive values for production environments are stored in an encrypted Git repository with the following file structure:

prod-author
   files
      conf
         secure
            author-certificate-1.p12
            author-certificate-2.p12
   secure-filtering-properties

prod-live
   files
      conf
         secure
            live-certificate-1.p12
            live-certificate-2.p12
   secure-filtering-properties

For information about how this is supported in CloudOps for Kubernetes, see Injecting Commerce Configuration at Runtime.