I am trying to load an external properties file into my spring boot app.
initially I used @PropertySource in the config class.
but now I want to remove this annotation so the class is not dependent on the location.
so I tried to use:

 java -jar my-boot-ws.war --SPRING_CONFIG_NAME=file:///Users/TMP/resources/

based on this http://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/boot-features-external-config.html documentation but I get the following error:

 Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Could not resolve placeholder

using the annotation works fine but I would really like to move away from that.
any help on this would be great

Thanks

****** CORRECTION *******

Sorry copy paste error the above command was supposed to be:

 java -jar my-boot-ws.war --spring.config.location=file:///Users/TMP/resources/

I'm not trying to change the name of the config file just add an additional location.
As explained here:

> If spring.config.location contains directories (as opposed to files)
> they should end in / (and will be appended with the names generated
> from spring.config.name before being loaded).

I interpreted this as saying that the file ${spring.application.name}.properties would be loaded from the --spring.config.location passed in from the command line