Thanks for sharing! This is so helpful!
On Sunday, October 5, 2025 at 7:32:58 AM UTC-7 steven gladwell wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I wanted to share a solution to an issue that cost me several hours of
> troubleshooting. If you're running CAS 7.1.x in standalone mode on an
> external servlet container (like Tomcat) and wondering why automatic
> configuration file watching isn't working, here's what I found.
>
> *The Problem:* The CAS documentation states that in standalone mode with
> spring.cloud.config.enabled=false, CAS will automatically watch and monitor
> configuration files for changes. Despite having the
> cas-server-core-events-configuration dependency and running in standalone
> mode, file changes to /etc/cas/config/cas.properties weren't triggering
> automatic reloads. Manual refresh via /actuator/refresh worked fine, but
> automatic file watching did nothing.
>
> *The Solution:* Add this property to your cas.properties:
> properties
> cas.events.core.track-configuration-modifications=true
>
> *How I Found It:* While digging through the CAS source code, I stumbled
> on a test file (CasConfigurationEventListenerTests) that led me to
> CasCoreConfigurationWatchAutoConfiguration. The critical piece is in the
> bean definition:
> java
> @Bean public InitializingBean casConfigurationWatchService( final
> ConfigurableApplicationContext applicationContext) { return BeanSupplier.
> of(InitializingBean.class) .when(BeanCondition.on(
> "cas.events.core.track-configuration-modifications").isTrue() .given
> (applicationContext.getEnvironment())) .supply(() -> new
> CasConfigurationWatchService(applicationContext)) .otherwiseProxy() .get();
> }
>
> The CasConfigurationWatchService bean only gets created when
> BeanCondition.on("cas.events.core.track-configuration-modifications").isTrue().
>
> Without this property set to true, the file watcher never initializes.
>
> *The Documentation Gap:* This required property is not mentioned anywhere
> in the "Configuration Management - Reloading Changes" documentation. The
> feature is disabled by default, and there's no indication in the docs that
> you need to explicitly enable it.
>
> *Verification:* After adding the property and restarting, I can now see
> the automatic reload messages in the logs when I modify cas.properties. The
> file watcher works exactly as described in the documentation - but only
> with this undocumented flag enabled.
>
> *CAS Version:* 7.1.6
> *Deployment:* WAR to Tomcat 11
> *Profile:* standalone
>
> Hope this saves someone else the troubleshooting time. If anyone from the
> CAS team is reading this, it would be great to see this property documented
> in the Configuration Reloading section.
>
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