Convert Spring Boot application.properties to JSON

Spring Boot application.properties

Spring Boot is the most popular Java framework, and application.properties is its primary configuration file. Properties use dot-notation to organize settings into logical groups: server.*, spring.datasource.*, spring.jpa.*, and logging.*.

Example Properties

server.port=8080
server.servlet.context-path=/api
spring.datasource.url=jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/mydb
spring.datasource.username=admin
spring.datasource.password=secret123
spring.jpa.hibernate.ddl-auto=update
spring.jpa.show-sql=true
logging.level.root=INFO
logging.level.com.example=DEBUG

Nested JSON Output

When converted with dot-notation expansion enabled, these flat keys become a deeply nested JSON object:

{
  "server": {
    "port": 8080,
    "servlet": {
      "contextPath": "/api"
    }
  },
  "spring": {
    "datasource": {
      "url": "jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/mydb",
      "username": "admin",
      "password": "secret123"
    },
    "jpa": {
      "hibernate": {
        "ddlAuto": "update"
      },
      "showSql": true
    }
  }
}

Key Behaviors

• Numeric values like 8080 are automatically typed as JSON numbers
• Boolean values like true become JSON booleans
• Dot-separated keys are split and nested into objects
• The hyphen-to-camelCase mapping (context-path to contextPath) preserves the original key as-is; the tool does not rename keys

This nested structure is useful when migrating Spring Boot configuration to YAML format or when integrating with JSON-based configuration management tools like HashiCorp Consul or Spring Cloud Config.