Spring Boot Reference Documentation

Spring Boot is compatible with Apache Maven 3.3 or above. If you do not already have Maven installed, you can follow the instructions at maven.apache.org.

Spring Boot dependencies use the org.springframework.boot groupId. Typically, your Maven POM file inherits from the spring-boot-starter-parent project and declares dependencies to one or more “Starters”. Spring Boot also provides an optional Maven plugin to create executable jars.

More details on getting started with Spring Boot and Maven can be found in the Getting Started section of the Maven plugin’s reference guide.

Spring Boot is compatible with Gradle 6 (6.3 or later). Gradle 5.6.x is also supported but this support is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. If you do not already have Gradle installed, you can follow the instructions at gradle.org.

Spring Boot dependencies can be declared by using the org.springframework.boot group. Typically, your project declares dependencies to one or more “Starters”. Spring Boot provides a useful Gradle plugin that can be used to simplify dependency declarations and to create executable jars.

More details on getting started with Spring Boot and Gradle can be found in the Getting Started section of the Gradle plugin’s reference guide.

You can download the Spring CLI distribution from the Spring software repository:

Cutting edge snapshot distributions are also available.

Once downloaded, follow the INSTALL.txt instructions from the unpacked archive. In summary, there is a spring script (spring.bat for Windows) in a bin/ directory in the .zip file. Alternatively, you can use java -jar with the .jar file (the script helps you to be sure that the classpath is set correctly).

SDKMAN! (The Software Development Kit Manager) can be used for managing multiple versions of various binary SDKs, including Groovy and the Spring Boot CLI. Get SDKMAN! from sdkman.io and install Spring Boot by using the following commands:

If you develop features for the CLI and want access to the version you built, use the following commands:

The preceding instructions install a local instance of spring called the dev instance. It points at your target build location, so every time you rebuild Spring Boot, spring is up-to-date.

You can see it by running the following command:

If you are on a Mac and use Homebrew, you can install the Spring Boot CLI by using the following commands:

Homebrew installs spring to /usr/local/bin.

If you are on a Mac and use MacPorts, you can install the Spring Boot CLI by using the following command:

The Spring Boot CLI includes scripts that provide command completion for the BASH and zsh shells. You can source the script (also named spring) in any shell or put it in your personal or system-wide bash completion initialization. On a Debian system, the system-wide scripts are in /shell-completion/bash and all scripts in that directory are executed when a new shell starts. For example, to run the script manually if you have installed by using SDKMAN!, use the following commands:

If you are on a Windows and use Scoop, you can install the Spring Boot CLI by using the following commands:

Scoop installs spring to ~/scoop/apps/springboot/current/bin.

You can use the following web application to test your installation. To start, create a file called app.groovy, as follows:

Then run it from a shell, as follows:

Open localhost:8080 in your favorite web browser. You should see the following output:

The first annotation on our Example class is @RestController. This is known as a stereotype annotation. It provides hints for people reading the code and for Spring that the class plays a specific role. In this case, our class is a web @Controller, so Spring considers it when handling incoming web requests.

The @RequestMapping annotation provides “routing” information. It tells Spring that any HTTP request with the / path should be mapped to the home method. The @RestController annotation tells Spring to render the resulting string directly back to the caller.

The second class-level annotation is @EnableAutoConfiguration. This annotation tells Spring Boot to “guess” how you want to configure Spring, based on the jar dependencies that you have added. Since spring-boot-starter-web added Tomcat and Spring MVC, the auto-configuration assumes that you are developing a web application and sets up Spring accordingly.

The final part of our application is the main method. This is a standard method that follows the Java convention for an application entry point. Our main method delegates to Spring Boot’s SpringApplication class by calling run. SpringApplication bootstraps our application, starting Spring, which, in turn, starts the auto-configured Tomcat web server. We need to pass Example.class as an argument to the run method to tell SpringApplication which is the primary Spring component. The args array is also passed through to expose any command-line arguments.

By default, each time your application restarts, a report showing the condition evaluation delta is logged. The report shows the changes to your application’s auto-configuration as you make changes such as adding or removing beans and setting configuration properties.

To disable the logging of the report, set the following property:

Certain resources do not necessarily need to trigger a restart when they are changed. For example, Thymeleaf templates can be edited in-place. By default, changing resources in /META-INF/maven, /META-INF/resources, /resources, /static, /public, or /templates does not trigger a restart but does trigger a live reload. If you want to customize these exclusions, you can use the spring.devtools.restart.exclude property. For example, to exclude only /static and /public you would set the following property:

You may want your application to be restarted or reloaded when you make changes to files that are not on the classpath. To do so, use the spring.devtools.restart.additional-paths property to configure additional paths to watch for changes. You can use the spring.devtools.restart.exclude property described earlier to control whether changes beneath the additional paths trigger a full restart or a live reload.

If you do not want to use the restart feature, you can disable it by using the spring.devtools.restart.enabled property. In most cases, you can set this property in your application.properties (doing so still initializes the restart classloader, but it does not watch for file changes).

If you need to completely disable restart support (for example, because it does not work with a specific library), you need to set the spring.devtools.restart.enabled System property to false before calling SpringApplication.run(…​), as shown in the following example:

If you work with an IDE that continuously compiles changed files, you might prefer to trigger restarts only at specific times. To do so, you can use a “trigger file”, which is a special file that must be modified when you want to actually trigger a restart check.

To use a trigger file, set the spring.devtools.restart.trigger-file property to the name (excluding any path) of your trigger file. The trigger file must appear somewhere on your classpath.

For example, if you have a project with the following structure:

Then your trigger-file property would be:

Restarts will now only happen when the src/main/resources/.reloadtrigger is updated.

Some IDEs have features that save you from needing to update your trigger file manually. Spring Tools for Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA (Ultimate Edition) both have such support. With Spring Tools, you can use the “reload” button from the console view (as long as your trigger-file is named .reloadtrigger). For IntelliJ IDEA, you can follow the instructions in their documentation.

As described earlier in the Restart vs Reload section, restart functionality is implemented by using two classloaders. For most applications, this approach works well. However, it can sometimes cause classloading issues.

By default, any open project in your IDE is loaded with the “restart” classloader, and any regular .jar file is loaded with the “base” classloader. If you work on a multi-module project, and not every module is imported into your IDE, you may need to customize things. To do so, you can create a META-INF/spring-devtools.properties file.

The spring-devtools.properties file can contain properties prefixed with restart.exclude and restart.include. The include elements are items that should be pulled up into the “restart” classloader, and the exclude elements are items that should be pushed down into the “base” classloader. The value of the property is a regex pattern that is applied to the classpath, as shown in the following example:

Restart functionality does not work well with objects that are deserialized by using a standard ObjectInputStream. If you need to deserialize data, you may need to use Spring’s ConfigurableObjectInputStream in combination with Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader().

Unfortunately, several third-party libraries deserialize without considering the context classloader. If you find such a problem, you need to request a fix with the original authors.

FileSystemWatcher works by polling the class changes with a certain time interval, and then waiting for a predefined quiet period to make sure there are no more changes. Since Spring Boot relies entirely on the IDE to compile and copy files into the location from where Spring Boot can read them, you might find that there are times when certain changes are not reflected when devtools restarts the application. If you observe such problems constantly, try increasing the spring.devtools.restart.poll-interval and spring.devtools.restart.quiet-period parameters to the values that fit your development environment:

The monitored classpath directories are now polled every 2 seconds for changes, and a 1 second quiet period is maintained to make sure there are no additional class changes.

The remote client application is designed to be run from within your IDE. You need to run org.springframework.boot.devtools.RemoteSpringApplication with the same classpath as the remote project that you connect to. The application’s single required argument is the remote URL to which it connects.

For example, if you are using Eclipse or STS and you have a project named my-app that you have deployed to Cloud Foundry, you would do the following:

A running remote client might resemble the following listing:

The remote client monitors your application classpath for changes in the same way as the local restart. Any updated resource is pushed to the remote application and (if required) triggers a restart. This can be helpful if you iterate on a feature that uses a cloud service that you do not have locally. Generally, remote updates and restarts are much quicker than a full rebuild and deploy cycle.

On a slower development environment, it may happen that the quiet period is not enough, and the changes in the classes may be split into batches. The server is restarted after the first batch of class changes is uploaded. The next batch can’t be sent to the application, since the server is restarting.

This is typically manifested by a warning in the RemoteSpringApplication logs about failing to upload some of the classes, and a consequent retry. But it may also lead to application code inconsistency and failure to restart after the first batch of changes is uploaded. If you observe such problems constantly, try increasing the spring.devtools.restart.poll-interval and spring.devtools.restart.quiet-period parameters to the values that fit your development environment. See the Configuring File System Watcher section for configuring these properties.

The “Liveness” state of an application tells whether its internal state allows it to work correctly, or recover by itself if it’s currently failing. A broken “Liveness” state means that the application is in a state that it cannot recover from, and the infrastructure should restart the application.

The internal state of Spring Boot applications is mostly represented by the Spring ApplicationContext. If the application context has started successfully, Spring Boot assumes that the application is in a valid state. An application is considered live as soon as the context has been refreshed, see Spring Boot application lifecycle and related Application Events.

The “Readiness” state of an application tells whether the application is ready to handle traffic. A failing “Readiness” state tells the platform that it should not route traffic to the application for now. This typically happens during startup, while CommandLineRunner and ApplicationRunner components are being processed, or at any time if the application decides that it’s too busy for additional traffic.

An application is considered ready as soon as application and command-line runners have been called, see Spring Boot application lifecycle and related Application Events.

Application components can retrieve the current availability state at any time, by injecting the ApplicationAvailability interface and calling methods on it. More often, applications will want to listen to state updates or update the state of the application.

For example, we can export the "Readiness" state of the application to a file so that a Kubernetes "exec Probe" can look at this file:

We can also update the state of the application, when the application breaks and cannot recover:

Spring Boot provides Kubernetes HTTP probes for "Liveness" and "Readiness" with Actuator Health Endpoints. You can get more guidance about deploying Spring Boot applications on Kubernetes in the dedicated section.

Spring Framework provides two convenient classes that can be used to load YAML documents. The YamlPropertiesFactoryBean loads YAML as Properties and the YamlMapFactoryBean loads YAML as a Map.

For example, consider the following YAML document:

The preceding example would be transformed into the following properties:

YAML lists are represented as property keys with [index] dereferencers. For example, consider the following YAML:

The preceding example would be transformed into these properties:

To bind to properties like that by using Spring Boot’s Binder utilities (which is what @ConfigurationProperties does), you need to have a property in the target bean of type java.util.List (or Set) and you either need to provide a setter or initialize it with a mutable value. For example, the following example binds to the properties shown previously:

The YamlPropertySourceLoader class can be used to expose YAML as a PropertySource in the Spring Environment. Doing so lets you use the @Value annotation with placeholders syntax to access YAML properties.

You can specify multiple profile-specific YAML documents in a single file by using a spring.profiles key to indicate when the document applies, as shown in the following example:

In the preceding example, if the development profile is active, the server.address property is 127.0.0.1. Similarly, if the production and eu-central profiles are active, the server.address property is 192.168.1.120. If the development, production and eu-central profiles are not enabled, then the value for the property is 192.168.1.100.

If none are explicitly active when the application context starts, the default profiles are activated. So, in the following YAML, we set a value for spring.security.user.password that is available only in the "default" profile:

Whereas, in the following example, the password is always set because it is not attached to any profile, and it would have to be explicitly reset in all other profiles as necessary:

Spring profiles designated by using the spring.profiles element may optionally be negated by using the ! character. If both negated and non-negated profiles are specified for a single document, at least one non-negated profile must match, and no negated profiles may match.

YAML files cannot be loaded by using the @PropertySource annotation. So, in the case that you need to load values that way, you need to use a properties file.

Using the multi YAML document syntax in profile-specific YAML files can lead to unexpected behavior. For example, consider the following config in a file:

If you run the application with the argument --spring.profiles.active=dev you might expect security.user.password to be set to “secret”, but this is not the case.

The nested document will be filtered because the main file is named application-dev.yml. It is already considered to be profile-specific, and nested documents will be ignored.

It is possible to bind a bean declaring standard JavaBean properties as shown in the following example:

The preceding POJO defines the following properties:

The example in the previous section can be rewritten in an immutable fashion as shown in the following example:

In this setup, the @ConstructorBinding annotation is used to indicate that constructor binding should be used. This means that the binder will expect to find a constructor with the parameters that you wish to have bound.

Nested members of a @ConstructorBinding class (such as Security in the example above) will also be bound via their constructor.

Default values can be specified using @DefaultValue and the same conversion service will be applied to coerce the String value to the target type of a missing property. By default, if no properties are bound to Security, the AcmeProperties instance will contain a null value for security. If you wish you return a non-null instance of Security even when no properties are bound to it, you can use an empty @DefaultValue annotation to do so:

Spring Boot provides infrastructure to bind @ConfigurationProperties types and register them as beans. You can either enable configuration properties on a class-by-class basis or enable configuration property scanning that works in a similar manner to component scanning.

Sometimes, classes annotated with @ConfigurationProperties might not be suitable for scanning, for example, if you’re developing your own auto-configuration or you want to enable them conditionally. In these cases, specify the list of types to process using the @EnableConfigurationProperties annotation. This can be done on any @Configuration class, as shown in the following example:

To use configuration property scanning, add the @ConfigurationPropertiesScan annotation to your application. Typically, it is added to the main application class that is annotated with @SpringBootApplication but it can be added to any @Configuration class. By default, scanning will occur from the package of the class that declares the annotation. If you want to define specific packages to scan, you can do so as shown in the following example:

We recommend that @ConfigurationProperties only deal with the environment and, in particular, does not inject other beans from the context. For corner cases, setter injection can be used or any of the *Aware interfaces provided by the framework (such as EnvironmentAware if you need access to the Environment). If you still want to inject other beans using the constructor, the configuration properties bean must be annotated with @Component and use JavaBean-based property binding.

This style of configuration works particularly well with the SpringApplication external YAML configuration, as shown in the following example:

To work with @ConfigurationProperties beans, you can inject them in the same way as any other bean, as shown in the following example:

As well as using @ConfigurationProperties to annotate a class, you can also use it on public @Bean methods. Doing so can be particularly useful when you want to bind properties to third-party components that are outside of your control.

To configure a bean from the Environment properties, add @ConfigurationProperties to its bean registration, as shown in the following example:

Any JavaBean property defined with the another prefix is mapped onto that AnotherComponent bean in manner similar to the preceding AcmeProperties example.

Spring Boot uses some relaxed rules for binding Environment properties to @ConfigurationProperties beans, so there does not need to be an exact match between the Environment property name and the bean property name. Common examples where this is useful include dash-separated environment properties (for example, context-path binds to contextPath), and capitalized environment properties (for example, PORT binds to port).

As an example, consider the following @ConfigurationProperties class:

With the preceding code, the following properties names can all be used:

When lists are configured in more than one place, overriding works by replacing the entire list.

For example, assume a MyPojo object with name and description attributes that are null by default. The following example exposes a list of MyPojo objects from AcmeProperties:

Consider the following configuration:

If the dev profile is not active, AcmeProperties.list contains one MyPojo entry, as previously defined. If the dev profile is enabled, however, the list still contains only one entry (with a name of my another name and a description of null). This configuration does not add a second MyPojo instance to the list, and it does not merge the items.

When a List is specified in multiple profiles, the one with the highest priority (and only that one) is used. Consider the following example:

In the preceding example, if the dev profile is active, AcmeProperties.list contains one MyPojo entry (with a name of my another name and a description of null). For YAML, both comma-separated lists and YAML lists can be used for completely overriding the contents of the list.

For Map properties, you can bind with property values drawn from multiple sources. However, for the same property in multiple sources, the one with the highest priority is used. The following example exposes a Map<String, MyPojo> from AcmeProperties:

Consider the following configuration:

If the dev profile is not active, AcmeProperties.map contains one entry with key key1 (with a name of my name 1 and a description of my description 1). If the dev profile is enabled, however, map contains two entries with keys key1 (with a name of dev name 1 and a description of my description 1) and key2 (with a name of dev name 2 and a description of dev description 2).

Spring Boot attempts to coerce the external application properties to the right type when it binds to the @ConfigurationProperties beans. If you need custom type conversion, you can provide a ConversionService bean (with a bean named conversionService) or custom property editors (through a CustomEditorConfigurer bean) or custom Converters (with bean definitions annotated as @ConfigurationPropertiesBinding).

Spring Boot attempts to validate @ConfigurationProperties classes whenever they are annotated with Spring’s @Validated annotation. You can use JSR-303 javax.validation constraint annotations directly on your configuration class. To do so, ensure that a compliant JSR-303 implementation is on your classpath and then add constraint annotations to your fields, as shown in the following example:

To ensure that validation is always triggered for nested properties, even when no properties are found, the associated field must be annotated with @Valid. The following example builds on the preceding AcmeProperties example:

You can also add a custom Spring Validator by creating a bean definition called configurationPropertiesValidator. The @Bean method should be declared static. The configuration properties validator is created very early in the application’s lifecycle, and declaring the @Bean method as static lets the bean be created without having to instantiate the @Configuration class. Doing so avoids any problems that may be caused by early instantiation.

The @Value annotation is a core container feature, and it does not provide the same features as type-safe configuration properties. The following table summarizes the features that are supported by @ConfigurationProperties and @Value:

If you define a set of configuration keys for your own components, we recommend you group them in a POJO annotated with @ConfigurationProperties. Doing so will provide you with structured, type-safe object that you can inject into your own beans.

If you do want to use @Value, we recommend that you refer to property names using their canonical form (kebab-case using only lowercase letters). This will allow Spring Boot to use the same logic as it does when relaxed binding @ConfigurationProperties. For example, @Value("{demo.item-price}") will pick up demo.item-price and demo.itemPrice forms from the application.properties file, as well as DEMO_ITEMPRICE from the system environment. If you used @Value("{demo.itemPrice}") instead, demo.item-price and DEMO_ITEMPRICE would not be considered.

Finally, while you can write a SpEL expression in @Value, such expressions are not processed from application property files.

If your terminal supports ANSI, color output is used to aid readability. You can set spring.output.ansi.enabled to a supported value to override the auto-detection.

Color coding is configured by using the %clr conversion word. In its simplest form, the converter colors the output according to the log level, as shown in the following example:

The following table describes the mapping of log levels to colors:

Alternatively, you can specify the color or style that should be used by providing it as an option to the conversion. For example, to make the text yellow, use the following setting:

The following colors and styles are supported:

The <springProfile> tag lets you optionally include or exclude sections of configuration based on the active Spring profiles. Profile sections are supported anywhere within the <configuration> element. Use the name attribute to specify which profile accepts the configuration. The <springProfile> tag can contain a profile name (for example staging) or a profile expression. A profile expression allows for more complicated profile logic to be expressed, for example production & (eu-central | eu-west). Check the reference guide for more details. The following listing shows three sample profiles:

The <springProperty> tag lets you expose properties from the Spring Environment for use within Logback. Doing so can be useful if you want to access values from your application.properties file in your Logback configuration. The tag works in a similar way to Logback’s standard <property> tag. However, rather than specifying a direct value, you specify the source of the property (from the Environment). If you need to store the property somewhere other than in local scope, you can use the scope attribute. If you need a fallback value (in case the property is not set in the Environment), you can use the defaultValue attribute. The following example shows how to expose properties for use within Logback:

Spring Boot provides auto-configuration for Spring MVC that works well with most applications.

The auto-configuration adds the following features on top of Spring’s defaults:

If you want to keep those Spring Boot MVC customizations and make more MVC customizations (interceptors, formatters, view controllers, and other features), you can add your own @Configuration class of type WebMvcConfigurer but without @EnableWebMvc.

If you want to provide custom instances of RequestMappingHandlerMapping, RequestMappingHandlerAdapter, or ExceptionHandlerExceptionResolver, and still keep the Spring Boot MVC customizations, you can declare a bean of type WebMvcRegistrations and use it to provide custom instances of those components.

If you want to take complete control of Spring MVC, you can add your own @Configuration annotated with @EnableWebMvc, or alternatively add your own @Configuration-annotated DelegatingWebMvcConfiguration as described in the Javadoc of @EnableWebMvc.

Spring MVC uses the HttpMessageConverter interface to convert HTTP requests and responses. Sensible defaults are included out of the box. For example, objects can be automatically converted to JSON (by using the Jackson library) or XML (by using the Jackson XML extension, if available, or by using JAXB if the Jackson XML extension is not available). By default, strings are encoded in UTF-8.

If you need to add or customize converters, you can use Spring Boot’s HttpMessageConverters class, as shown in the following listing:

Any HttpMessageConverter bean that is present in the context is added to the list of converters. You can also override default converters in the same way.

If you use Jackson to serialize and deserialize JSON data, you might want to write your own JsonSerializer and JsonDeserializer classes. Custom serializers are usually registered with Jackson through a module, but Spring Boot provides an alternative @JsonComponent annotation that makes it easier to directly register Spring Beans.

You can use the @JsonComponent annotation directly on JsonSerializer, JsonDeserializer or KeyDeserializer implementations. You can also use it on classes that contain serializers/deserializers as inner classes, as shown in the following example:

All @JsonComponent beans in the ApplicationContext are automatically registered with Jackson. Because @JsonComponent is meta-annotated with @Component, the usual component-scanning rules apply.

Spring Boot also provides JsonObjectSerializer and JsonObjectDeserializer base classes that provide useful alternatives to the standard Jackson versions when serializing objects. See JsonObjectSerializer and JsonObjectDeserializer in the Javadoc for details.

Spring MVC has a strategy for generating error codes for rendering error messages from binding errors: MessageCodesResolver. If you set the spring.mvc.message-codes-resolver-format property PREFIX_ERROR_CODE or POSTFIX_ERROR_CODE, Spring Boot creates one for you (see the enumeration in DefaultMessageCodesResolver.Format).

By default, Spring Boot serves static content from a directory called /static (or /public or /resources or /META-INF/resources) in the classpath or from the root of the ServletContext. It uses the ResourceHttpRequestHandler from Spring MVC so that you can modify that behavior by adding your own WebMvcConfigurer and overriding the addResourceHandlers method.

In a stand-alone web application, the default servlet from the container is also enabled and acts as a fallback, serving content from the root of the ServletContext if Spring decides not to handle it. Most of the time, this does not happen (unless you modify the default MVC configuration), because Spring can always handle requests through the DispatcherServlet.

By default, resources are mapped on /**, but you can tune that with the spring.mvc.static-path-pattern property. For instance, relocating all resources to /resources/** can be achieved as follows:

You can also customize the static resource locations by using the spring.resources.static-locations property (replacing the default values with a list of directory locations). The root Servlet context path, "/", is automatically added as a location as well.

In addition to the “standard” static resource locations mentioned earlier, a special case is made for Webjars content. Any resources with a path in /webjars/** are served from jar files if they are packaged in the Webjars format.

Spring Boot also supports the advanced resource handling features provided by Spring MVC, allowing use cases such as cache-busting static resources or using version agnostic URLs for Webjars.

To use version agnostic URLs for Webjars, add the webjars-locator-core dependency. Then declare your Webjar. Using jQuery as an example, adding "/webjars/jquery/jquery.min.js" results in "/webjars/jquery/x.y.z/jquery.min.js" where x.y.z is the Webjar version.

To use cache busting, the following configuration configures a cache busting solution for all static resources, effectively adding a content hash, such as <link href="/css/spring-2a2d595e6ed9a0b24f027f2b63b134d6.css"/>, in URLs:

When loading resources dynamically with, for example, a JavaScript module loader, renaming files is not an option. That is why other strategies are also supported and can be combined. A "fixed" strategy adds a static version string in the URL without changing the file name, as shown in the following example:

With this configuration, JavaScript modules located under "/js/lib/" use a fixed versioning strategy ("/v12/js/lib/mymodule.js"), while other resources still use the content one (<link href="/css/spring-2a2d595e6ed9a0b24f027f2b63b134d6.css"/>).

See ResourceProperties for more supported options.

Spring Boot supports both static and templated welcome pages. It first looks for an index.html file in the configured static content locations. If one is not found, it then looks for an index template. If either is found, it is automatically used as the welcome page of the application.

As with other static resources, Spring Boot looks for a favicon.ico in the configured static content locations. If such a file is present, it is automatically used as the favicon of the application.

Spring MVC can map incoming HTTP requests to handlers by looking at the request path and matching it to the mappings defined in your application (for example, @GetMapping annotations on Controller methods).

Spring Boot chooses to disable suffix pattern matching by default, which means that requests like "GET /projects/spring-boot.json" won’t be matched to @GetMapping("/projects/spring-boot") mappings. This is considered as a best practice for Spring MVC applications. This feature was mainly useful in the past for HTTP clients which did not send proper "Accept" request headers; we needed to make sure to send the correct Content Type to the client. Nowadays, Content Negotiation is much more reliable.

There are other ways to deal with HTTP clients that don’t consistently send proper "Accept" request headers. Instead of using suffix matching, we can use a query parameter to ensure that requests like "GET /projects/spring-boot?format=json" will be mapped to @GetMapping("/projects/spring-boot"):

Suffix pattern matching is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. If you understand the caveats and would still like your application to use suffix pattern matching, the following configuration is required:

Alternatively, rather than open all suffix patterns, it’s more secure to only support registered suffix patterns:

Spring MVC uses a WebBindingInitializer to initialize a WebDataBinder for a particular request. If you create your own ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer @Bean, Spring Boot automatically configures Spring MVC to use it.

As well as REST web services, you can also use Spring MVC to serve dynamic HTML content. Spring MVC supports a variety of templating technologies, including Thymeleaf, FreeMarker, and JSPs. Also, many other templating engines include their own Spring MVC integrations.

Spring Boot includes auto-configuration support for the following templating engines:

When you use one of these templating engines with the default configuration, your templates are picked up automatically from src/main/resources/templates.

By default, Spring Boot provides an /error mapping that handles all errors in a sensible way, and it is registered as a “global” error page in the servlet container. For machine clients, it produces a JSON response with details of the error, the HTTP status, and the exception message. For browser clients, there is a “whitelabel” error view that renders the same data in HTML format (to customize it, add a View that resolves to error). To replace the default behavior completely, you can implement ErrorController and register a bean definition of that type or add a bean of type ErrorAttributes to use the existing mechanism but replace the contents.

You can also define a class annotated with @ControllerAdvice to customize the JSON document to return for a particular controller and/or exception type, as shown in the following example:

In the preceding example, if YourException is thrown by a controller defined in the same package as AcmeController, a JSON representation of the CustomErrorType POJO is used instead of the ErrorAttributes representation.

If you develop a RESTful API that makes use of hypermedia, Spring Boot provides auto-configuration for Spring HATEOAS that works well with most applications. The auto-configuration replaces the need to use @EnableHypermediaSupport and registers a number of beans to ease building hypermedia-based applications, including a LinkDiscoverers (for client side support) and an ObjectMapper configured to correctly marshal responses into the desired representation. The ObjectMapper is customized by setting the various spring.jackson.* properties or, if one exists, by a Jackson2ObjectMapperBuilder bean.

You can take control of Spring HATEOAS’s configuration by using @EnableHypermediaSupport. Note that doing so disables the ObjectMapper customization described earlier.

Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) is a W3C specification implemented by most browsers that lets you specify in a flexible way what kind of cross-domain requests are authorized., instead of using some less secure and less powerful approaches such as IFRAME or JSONP.

As of version 4.2, Spring MVC supports CORS. Using controller method CORS configuration with @CrossOrigin annotations in your Spring Boot application does not require any specific configuration. Global CORS configuration can be defined by registering a WebMvcConfigurer bean with a customized addCorsMappings(CorsRegistry) method, as shown in the following example:

Spring Boot provides auto-configuration for Spring WebFlux that works well with most applications.

The auto-configuration adds the following features on top of Spring’s defaults:

If you want to keep Spring Boot WebFlux features and you want to add additional WebFlux configuration, you can add your own @Configuration class of type WebFluxConfigurer but without @EnableWebFlux.

If you want to take complete control of Spring WebFlux, you can add your own @Configuration annotated with @EnableWebFlux.

Spring WebFlux uses the HttpMessageReader and HttpMessageWriter interfaces to convert HTTP requests and responses. They are configured with CodecConfigurer to have sensible defaults by looking at the libraries available in your classpath.

Spring Boot provides dedicated configuration properties for codecs, spring.codec.*. It also applies further customization by using CodecCustomizer instances. For example, spring.jackson.* configuration keys are applied to the Jackson codec.

If you need to add or customize codecs, you can create a custom CodecCustomizer component, as shown in the following example:

You can also leverage Boot’s custom JSON serializers and deserializers.

By default, Spring Boot serves static content from a directory called /static (or /public or /resources or /META-INF/resources) in the classpath. It uses the ResourceWebHandler from Spring WebFlux so that you can modify that behavior by adding your own WebFluxConfigurer and overriding the addResourceHandlers method.

By default, resources are mapped on /**, but you can tune that by setting the spring.webflux.static-path-pattern property. For instance, relocating all resources to /resources/** can be achieved as follows:

You can also customize the static resource locations by using spring.resources.static-locations. Doing so replaces the default values with a list of directory locations. If you do so, the default welcome page detection switches to your custom locations. So, if there is an index.html in any of your locations on startup, it is the home page of the application.

In addition to the “standard” static resource locations listed earlier, a special case is made for Webjars content. Any resources with a path in /webjars/** are served from jar files if they are packaged in the Webjars format.

Spring Boot supports both static and templated welcome pages. It first looks for an index.html file in the configured static content locations. If one is not found, it then looks for an index template. If either is found, it is automatically used as the welcome page of the application.

As well as REST web services, you can also use Spring WebFlux to serve dynamic HTML content. Spring WebFlux supports a variety of templating technologies, including Thymeleaf, FreeMarker, and Mustache.

Spring Boot includes auto-configuration support for the following templating engines:

When you use one of these templating engines with the default configuration, your templates are picked up automatically from src/main/resources/templates.

Spring Boot provides a WebExceptionHandler that handles all errors in a sensible way. Its position in the processing order is immediately before the handlers provided by WebFlux, which are considered last. For machine clients, it produces a JSON response with details of the error, the HTTP status, and the exception message. For browser clients, there is a “whitelabel” error handler that renders the same data in HTML format. You can also provide your own HTML templates to display errors (see the next section).

The first step to customizing this feature often involves using the existing mechanism but replacing or augmenting the error contents. For that, you can add a bean of type ErrorAttributes.

To change the error handling behavior, you can implement ErrorWebExceptionHandler and register a bean definition of that type. Because a WebExceptionHandler is quite low-level, Spring Boot also provides a convenient AbstractErrorWebExceptionHandler to let you handle errors in a WebFlux functional way, as shown in the following example:

For a more complete picture, you can also subclass DefaultErrorWebExceptionHandler directly and override specific methods.

Spring WebFlux provides a WebFilter interface that can be implemented to filter HTTP request-response exchanges. WebFilter beans found in the application context will be automatically used to filter each exchange.

Where the order of the filters is important they can implement Ordered or be annotated with @Order. Spring Boot auto-configuration may configure web filters for you. When it does so, the orders shown in the following table will be used:

When using an embedded servlet container, you can register servlets, filters, and all the listeners (such as HttpSessionListener) from the Servlet spec, either by using Spring beans or by scanning for Servlet components.

Embedded servlet containers do not directly execute the Servlet 3.0+ javax.servlet.ServletContainerInitializer interface or Spring’s org.springframework.web.WebApplicationInitializer interface. This is an intentional design decision intended to reduce the risk that third party libraries designed to run inside a war may break Spring Boot applications.

If you need to perform servlet context initialization in a Spring Boot application, you should register a bean that implements the org.springframework.boot.web.servlet.ServletContextInitializer interface. The single onStartup method provides access to the ServletContext and, if necessary, can easily be used as an adapter to an existing WebApplicationInitializer.

Under the hood, Spring Boot uses a different type of ApplicationContext for embedded servlet container support. The ServletWebServerApplicationContext is a special type of WebApplicationContext that bootstraps itself by searching for a single ServletWebServerFactory bean. Usually a TomcatServletWebServerFactory, JettyServletWebServerFactory, or UndertowServletWebServerFactory has been auto-configured.

Common servlet container settings can be configured by using Spring Environment properties. Usually, you would define the properties in your application.properties file.

Common server settings include:

Spring Boot tries as much as possible to expose common settings, but this is not always possible. For those cases, dedicated namespaces offer server-specific customizations (see server.tomcat and server.undertow). For instance, access logs can be configured with specific features of the embedded servlet container.

When running a Spring Boot application that uses an embedded servlet container (and is packaged as an executable archive), there are some limitations in the JSP support.

If you have spring-security-oauth2-client on your classpath, you can take advantage of some auto-configuration to set up an OAuth2/Open ID Connect clients. This configuration makes use of the properties under OAuth2ClientProperties. The same properties are applicable to both servlet and reactive applications.

You can register multiple OAuth2 clients and providers under the spring.security.oauth2.client prefix, as shown in the following example:

For OpenID Connect providers that support OpenID Connect discovery, the configuration can be further simplified. The provider needs to be configured with an issuer-uri which is the URI that the it asserts as its Issuer Identifier. For example, if the issuer-uri provided is "https://example.com", then an OpenID Provider Configuration Request will be made to "https://example.com/.well-known/openid-configuration". The result is expected to be an OpenID Provider Configuration Response. The following example shows how an OpenID Connect Provider can be configured with the issuer-uri:

By default, Spring Security’s OAuth2LoginAuthenticationFilter only processes URLs matching /login/oauth2/code/*. If you want to customize the redirect-uri to use a different pattern, you need to provide configuration to process that custom pattern. For example, for servlet applications, you can add your own WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter that resembles the following:

If you have spring-security-oauth2-resource-server on your classpath, Spring Boot can set up an OAuth2 Resource Server. For JWT configuration, a JWK Set URI or OIDC Issuer URI needs to be specified, as shown in the following examples:

The same properties are applicable for both servlet and reactive applications.

Alternatively, you can define your own JwtDecoder bean for servlet applications or a ReactiveJwtDecoder for reactive applications.

In cases where opaque tokens are used instead of JWTs, you can configure the following properties to validate tokens via introspection:

Again, the same properties are applicable for both servlet and reactive applications.

Alternatively, you can define your own OpaqueTokenIntrospector bean for servlet applications or a ReactiveOpaqueTokenIntrospector for reactive applications.

Currently, Spring Security does not provide support for implementing an OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server. However, this functionality is available from the Spring Security OAuth project, which will eventually be superseded by Spring Security completely. Until then, you can use the spring-security-oauth2-autoconfigure module to easily set up an OAuth 2.0 authorization server; see its documentation for instructions.

If you have spring-security-saml2-service-provider on your classpath, you can take advantage of some auto-configuration to set up a SAML 2.0 Relying Party. This configuration makes use of the properties under Saml2RelyingPartyProperties.

A relying party registration represents a paired configuration between an Identity Provider, IDP, and a Service Provider, SP. You can register multiple relying parties under the spring.security.saml2.relyingparty prefix, as shown in the following example: