It is now possible to directly reference environment variables without the prefix. The Liberty variable resolution order means that this won’t affect existing configurations (a variable from any other source overrides the environment), but it means that when you go from local development environments to Docker containers, you do not need to rewrite your server configuration file just to specify it from the environment.

With the environment being overridden by everything else it isn’t possible to specify defaults from the environment. This means that when you go to Docker you have to specify everything in docker -e or in Kubernetes even if you can sensibly define a default most of the time. Now you can just define a default value in server.xml that will only be used if the value is not provided by any other source. This greatly simplifies docker configuration. To implement this simply specify the default value like this: <variable name = " my.variable " defaultValue = " some default " />