ConsulConfigProperties#getAclToken() remains null although spring.cloud.consul.token is available in the Environment

[amirrs82]

Description

I'm investigating the behavior of ConsulConfigProperties#getAclToken() in Spring Cloud Consul and I'm not sure whether this is an intended behavior or a bug.

In my application, spring.cloud.consul.token is successfully loaded from Spring Cloud Vault through ConfigData.

The property is available in the Environment, and a regular @Value("${spring.cloud.consul.token}") injection works correctly.

However, ConsulConfigProperties#getAclToken() always returns null.

Versions

• Spring Boot: 3.5.14
• Spring Cloud Release Train: 2025.0.1
• spring-cloud-consul-config: 4.3.1

Configuration

spring:
  config:
    import:
      - vault://
      - consul://

  cloud:
    consul:
      config:
        enabled: true

The Consul ACL token is stored in Vault under:

spring.cloud.consul.token

Observations

The following values are logged during application startup:

Environment.getProperty("spring.cloud.consul.token")
=> 08****35 (masked intentionally)

ConsulConfigProperties#getAclToken()
=> null

The property source owning the property is:

dev-secret/consul-configs

Additional verification

To make sure this was not a configuration issue, I performed the following checks:

• Environment.getProperty("spring.cloud.consul.token") returns the expected value.
• A regular Spring bean using

@Value("${spring.cloud.consul.token}")
private String token;

receives the correct value.

• ConsulConfigProperties itself is properly bound:

  • enabled
  • defaultContext
  • prefixes

  all contain the expected values.

• Using reflection confirms that the internal aclToken field is still null.

Field field = ConsulConfigProperties.class.getDeclaredField("aclToken");
field.setAccessible(true);

System.out.println(field.get(consulConfigProperties));
// null

The field is annotated with:

@Value("${consul.token:${CONSUL_TOKEN:${spring.cloud.consul.token:${SPRING_CLOUD_CONSUL_TOKEN:}}}}")
private String aclToken;

and the annotation is present at runtime.

Question

Is this expected?

Should ConsulConfigProperties#getAclToken() be populated from spring.cloud.consul.token, or is the aclToken field intentionally left unset when using ConfigData (Vault)?

If it is expected to be populated, this appears to be a regression because:

• the property exists in the Environment,
• @Value works on regular Spring beans,
• only the aclToken field inside ConsulConfigProperties remains null.

[oliverlockwood]

@amirrs82 I believe it is possible for the issue you describe to be a consequence of the bug I describe here: spring-cloud/spring-cloud-commons/issues/1716.