Endpoints can be customized using Spring properties. You can change if an endpoint is enabled, if it is considered sensitive and even its id.

For example, here is an application.properties that changes the sensitivity and id of the beans endpoint and also enables shutdown.

endpoints.beans.id=springbeans
endpoints.beans.sensitive=false
endpoints.shutdown.enabled=true

	Note
	The prefix ‟endpoints + . + name” is used to uniquely identify the endpoint that is being configured.

By default, all endpoints except for shutdown are enabled. If you prefer to specifically “opt-in” endpoint enablement you can use the endpoints.enabled property. For example, the following will disable all endpoints except for info:

endpoints.enabled=false
endpoints.info.enabled=true

If Spring HATEOAS is on the classpath (e.g. through the spring-boot-starter-hateoas or if you are using Spring Data REST) then the HTTP endpoints from the Actuator are enhanced with hypermedia links, and a “discovery page” is added with links to all the endpoints. The “discovery page” is actually an endpoint itself, so it can be disabled along with the rest of the hypermedia by setting endpoints.links.enabled=false. If it is not explicitly disabled the links endpoint renders a JSON object with a link for each other endpoint, and the default path is the same as the management.content-path (so “/” by default).

	Note
	if there is a static home page (“index.html”) in your application and the links endpoint is registered with its default path (“/”) then content negotiation will kick in to determine which content is shown to a client that requests the home page (the links will show only if the client accepts application/json).

If the HAL Browser is on the classpath via its webjar (org.webjars:hal-browser), or via the spring-data-hal-browser then the default home page for HTML clients will be the HAL Browser. This is also exposed via an endpoint (“hal”) so it can be disabled and have its path explicitly configured like the other endpoints.

If you add a @Bean of type Endpoint then it will automatically be exposed over JMX and HTTP (if there is an server available). An HTTP endpoints can be customized further by creating a bean of type MvcEndpoint. Your MvcEndpoint is not a @Controller but it can use @RequestMapping (and @Managed*) to expose resources.

Tip

If you are doing this as a library feature consider adding a configuration class to /META-INF/spring.factories under the key org.springframework.boot.actuate.autoconfigure.EndpointWebMvcConfiguration. If you do that then the endpoint will move to a child context with all the other MVC endpoints if your users ask for a separate management port or address. A configuration declared this way can be a WebConfigurerAdapter if it wants to add static resources (for instance) to the management endpoints.

Health information can be used to check the status of your running application. It is often used by monitoring software to alert someone if a production system goes down. The default information exposed by the health endpoint depends on how it is accessed. For an unauthenticated connection in a secure application a simple ‘status’ message is returned, and for an authenticated connection additional details are also displayed (see Section 45.6, “HTTP health endpoint access restrictions” for HTTP details).

Health information is collected from all HealthIndicator beans defined in your ApplicationContext. Spring Boot includes a number of auto-configured HealthIndicators and you can also write your own.

Information returned by HealthIndicators is often somewhat sensitive in nature. For example, you probably don’t want to publish details of your database server to the world. For this reason, by default, only the health status is exposed over an unauthenticated HTTP connection. If you are happy for complete health information to always be exposed you can set endpoints.health.sensitive to false.

Health responses are also cached to prevent “denial of service” attacks. Use the endpoints.health.time-to-live property if you want to change the default cache period of 1000 milliseconds.

import org.springframework.boot.actuate.health.HealthIndicator;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;

@Component
public class MyHealth implements HealthIndicator {

    @Override
    public Health health() {
        int errorCode = check(); // perform some specific health check
        if (errorCode != 0) {
            return Health.down().withDetail("Error Code", errorCode).build();
        }
        return Health.up().build();
    }

}

management.health.status.order=DOWN, OUT_OF_SERVICE, UNKNOWN, UP

You can customize the data exposed by the info endpoint by setting info.* Spring properties. All Environment properties under the info key will be automatically exposed. For example, you could add the following to your application.properties:

info.app.name=MyService
info.app.description=My awesome service
info.app.version=1.0.0

44.6.1 Automatically expand info properties at build time

Rather than hardcoding some properties that are also specified in your project’s build configuration, you can automatically expand info properties using the existing build configuration instead. This is possible in both Maven and Gradle.

Automatic property expansion using Maven

You can automatically expand info properties from the Maven project using resource filtering. If you use the spring-boot-starter-parent you can then refer to your Maven ‘project properties’ via @..@ placeholders, e.g.

project.artifactId=myproject
project.name=Demo
project.version=X.X.X.X
project.description=Demo project for info endpoint
info.build.artifact[email protected]@
info.build.name[email protected]@
info.build.description[email protected]@
info.build.version[email protected]@

	Note
	In the above example we used project.* to set some values to be used as fallbacks if the Maven resource filtering has not been switched on for some reason.

	Tip
	The spring-boot:run maven goal adds src/main/resources directly to the classpath (for hot reloading purposes). This circumvents the resource filtering and this feature. You can use the exec:java goal instead or customize the plugin’s configuration, see the plugin usage page for more details.

If you don’t use the starter parent, in your pom.xml you need (inside the <build/> element):

<resources>
    <resource>
        <directory>src/main/resources</directory>
        <filtering>true</filtering>
    </resource>
</resources>

and (inside <plugins/>):

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-resources-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.6</version>
    <configuration>
        <delimiters>
            <delimiter>@</delimiter>
        </delimiters>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

Automatic property expansion using Gradle

You can automatically expand info properties from the Gradle project by configuring the Java plugin’s processResources task to do so:

processResources {
    expand(project.properties)
}

You can then refer to your Gradle project’s properties via placeholders, e.g.

info.build.name=${name}
info.build.description=${description}
info.build.version=${version}

	Note
	Gradle’s expand method uses Groovy’s SimpleTemplateEngine which transforms ${..} tokens. The ${..} style conflicts with Spring’s own property placeholder mechanism. To use Spring property placeholders together with automatic expansion the Spring property placeholders need to be escaped like \${..}.

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>pl.project13.maven</groupId>
            <artifactId>git-commit-id-plugin</artifactId>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>