16. Auto-configuration

Spring Boot auto-configuration attempts to automatically configure your Spring application based on the jar dependencies that you have added. For example, If HSQLDB is on your classpath, and you have not manually configured any database connection beans, then we will auto-configure an in-memory database.

You need to opt-in to auto-configuration by adding the @EnableAutoConfiguration or @SpringBootApplication annotations to one of your @Configuration classes.

[Tip]Tip

You should only ever add one @EnableAutoConfiguration annotation. We generally recommend that you add it to your primary @Configuration class.

16.1 Gradually replacing auto-configuration

Auto-configuration is noninvasive, at any point you can start to define your own configuration to replace specific parts of the auto-configuration. For example, if you add your own DataSource bean, the default embedded database support will back away.

If you need to find out what auto-configuration is currently being applied, and why, start your application with the --debug switch. This will log an auto-configuration report to the console.

16.2 Disabling specific auto-configuration

If you find that specific auto-configure classes are being applied that you don’t want, you can use the exclude attribute of @EnableAutoConfiguration to disable them.

import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.*;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.jdbc.*;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.*;

@Configuration
@EnableAutoConfiguration(exclude={DataSourceAutoConfiguration.class})
public class MyConfiguration {
}

If the class is not on the classpath, you can use the excludeName attribute of the annotation and specify the fully qualified name instead. Finally, you can also control the list of auto-configuration classes to exclude via the spring.autoconfigure.exclude property.

[Tip]Tip

You can define exclusions both at the annotation level and using the property.