Spring Boot Features

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.

By default, when a specified config data location does not exist, Spring Boot will throw a ConfigDataLocationNotFoundException and your application will not start.

If you want to specify a location, but you don’t mind if it doesn’t always exist, you can use the optional: prefix. You can use this prefix with the spring.config.location and spring.config.additional-location properties, as well as with spring.config.import declarations.

For example, a spring.config.import value of optional:file:./myconfig.properties allows your application to start, even if the myconfig.properties file is missing.

If you want to ignore all ConfigDataLocationNotFoundExceptions and always continue to start your application, you can use the spring.config.on-not-found property. Set the value to ignore using SpringApplication.setDefaultProperties(…​) or with a system/environment variable.

If a config file location includes the * character for the last path segment, it is considered a wildcard location. Wildcards are expanded when the config is loaded so that immediate subdirectories are also checked. Wildcard locations are particularly useful in an environment such as Kubernetes when there are multiple sources of config properties.

For example, if you have some Redis configuration and some MySQL configuration, you might want to keep those two pieces of configuration separate, while requiring that both those are present in an application.properties file. This might result in two separate application.properties files mounted at different locations such as /config/redis/application.properties and /config/mysql/application.properties. In such a case, having a wildcard location of config/*/, will result in both files being processed.

By default, Spring Boot includes config/*/ in the default search locations. It means that all subdirectories of the /config directory outside of your jar will be searched.

You can use wildcard locations yourself with the spring.config.location and spring.config.additional-location properties.

As well as application property files, Spring Boot will also attempt to load profile-specific files using the naming convention application-{profile}. For example, if your application activates a profile named prod and uses YAML files, then both application.yml and application-prod.yml will be considered.

Profile-specific properties are loaded from the same locations as standard application.properties, with profile-specific files always overriding the non-specific ones. If several profiles are specified, a last-wins strategy applies. For example, if profiles prod,live are specified by the spring.profiles.active property, values in application-prod.properties can be overridden by those in application-live.properties.

The Environment has a set of default profiles (by default, [default]) that are used if no active profiles are set. In other words, if no profiles are explicitly activated, then properties from application-default are considered.

Application properties may import further config data from other locations using the spring.config.import property. Imports are processed as they are discovered, and are treated as additional documents inserted immediately below the one that declares the import.

For example, you might have the following in your classpath application.properties file:

This will trigger the import of a dev.properties file in current directory (if such a file exists). Values from the imported dev.properties will take precedence over the file that triggered the import. In the above example, the dev.properties could redefine spring.application.name to a different value.

An import will only be imported once no matter how many times it is declared. The order an import is defined inside a single document within the properties/yaml file doesn’t matter. For instance, the two examples below produce the same result:

In both of the above examples, the values from the my.properties file will take precedence over the file that triggered its import.

Several locations can be specified under a single spring.config.import key. Locations will be processed in the order that they are defined, with later imports taking precedence.

Some cloud platforms cannot add a file extension to volume mounted files. To import these extensionless files, you need to give Spring Boot a hint so that it knows how to load them. You can do this by putting an extension hint in square brackets.

For example, suppose you have a /etc/config/myconfig file that you wish to import as yaml. You can import it from your application.properties using the following:

When running applications on a cloud platform (such as Kubernetes) you often need to read config values that the platform supplies. It’s not uncommon to use environment variables for such purposes, but this can have drawbacks, especially if the value is supposed to be kept secret.

As an alternative to environment variables, many cloud platforms now allow you to map configuration into mounted data volumes. For example, Kubernetes can volume mount both ConfigMaps and Secrets.

There are two common volume mount patterns that can be used:

For the first case, you can import the YAML or Properties file directly using spring.config.import as described above. For the second case, you need to use the configtree: prefix so that Spring Boot knows it needs to expose all the files as properties.

As an example, let’s imagine that Kubernetes has mounted the following volume:

The contents of the username file would be a config value, and the contents of password would be a secret.

To import these properties, you can add the following to your application.properties or application.yaml file:

You can then access or inject myapp.username and myapp.password properties from the Environment in the usual way.

If you have multiple config trees to import from the same parent folder you can use a wildcard shortcut. Any configtree: location that ends with /*/ will import all immediate children as config trees.

For example, given the following volume:

You can use configtree:/etc/config/*/ as the import location:

This will add db.username, db.password, mq.username and mq.password properties.

Configuration trees can also be used for Docker secrets. When a Docker swarm service is granted access to a secret, the secret gets mounted into the container. For example, if a secret named db.password is mounted at location /run/secrets/, you can make db.password available to the Spring environment using the following:

The values in application.properties and application.yml are filtered through the existing Environment when they are used, so you can refer back to previously defined values (for example, from System properties or environment variables). The standard ${name} property-placeholder syntax can be used anywhere within a value. Property placeholders can also specify a default value using a : to separate the default value from the property name, for example ${name:default}.

The use of placeholders with and without defaults is shown in the following example:

Assuming that the username property has not be set elsewhere, app.description will have the value MyApp is a Spring Boot application written by Unknown.

Spring Boot allows you to split a single physical file into multiple logical documents which are each added independently. Documents are processed in order, from top to bottom. Later documents can override the properties defined in earlier ones.

For application.yml files, the standard YAML multi-document syntax is used. Three consecutive hyphens represent the end of one document, and the start of the next.

For example, the following file has two logical documents:

For application.properties files a special #--- comment is used to mark the document splits:

It’s sometimes useful to only activate a given set of properties when certain conditions are met. For example, you might have properties that are only relevant when a specific profile is active.

You can conditionally activate a properties document using spring.config.activate.*.

The following activation properties are available:

For example, the following specifies that the second document is only active when running on Kubernetes, and only when either the “prod” or “staging” profiles are active:

YAML documents need to be converted from their hierarchical format to a flat structure that can be used with the Spring Environment. For example, consider the following YAML document:

In order to access these properties from the Environment, they would be flattened as follows:

Likewise, YAML lists also need to be flattened. They are represented as property keys with [index] dereferencers. For example, consider the following YAML:

The preceding example would be transformed into these properties:

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.

You can also use the YamlPropertySourceLoader class if you want to load YAML as a Spring PropertySource.

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. If you are using Java 16 or later, constructor binding can be used with records.

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 on a constructor parameter or, when using Java 16 or later, a record component. The conversion service will be applied to coerce the String value to the target type of a missing property.

Referring to the previous example, if no properties are bound to Security, the MyProperties 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 SomeProperties 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 MyProperties:

Consider the following configuration:

If the dev profile is not active, MyProperties.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, MyProperties.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 MyProperties:

Consider the following configuration:

If the dev profile is not active, MyProperties.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 MyProperties 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.

SpEL expressions from application property files are not processed at time of parsing these files and populating the environment. However, it is possible to write a SpEL expression in @Value. If the value of a property from an application property file is a SpEL expression, it will be evaluated when consumed via @Value.

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.

The example above can be rewritten to use JsonObjectSerializer/JsonObjectDeserializer as follows:

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.web.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.

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"):

Or if you prefer to use a different parameter name:

Most standard media types are supported out-of-the-box, but you can also define new ones:

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:

As of Spring Framework 5.3, Spring MVC supports several implementation strategies for matching request paths to Controller handlers. It was previously only supporting the AntPathMatcher strategy, but it now also offers PathPatternParser. Spring Boot now provides a configuration property to choose and opt in the new strategy:

For more details on why you should consider this new implementation, please check out the dedicated blog post.

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).

There are a number of server.error properties that can be set if you want to customize the default error handling behavior. See the “Server Properties” section of the Appendix.

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 SomeController, a JSON representation of the CustomErrorType POJO is used instead of the ErrorAttributes representation.

In some cases, errors handled at the controller level are not recorded by the metrics infrastructure. Applications can ensure that such exceptions are recorded with the request metrics by setting the handled exception as a request attribute:

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.web.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 ErrorWebExceptionHandler 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.

In some cases, errors handled at the controller or handler function level are not recorded by the metrics infrastructure. Applications can ensure that such exceptions are recorded with the request metrics by setting the handled exception as a request attribute:

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.

In an embedded container setup, the ServletContext is set as part of server startup which happens during application context initialization. Because of this beans in the ApplicationContext cannot be reliably initialized with a ServletContext. One way to get around this is to inject ApplicationContext as a dependency of the bean and access the ServletContext only when it is needed. Another way is to use a callback once the server has started. This can be done using an ApplicationListener which listens for the ApplicationStartedEvent as follows:

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

Since Spring Boot relies on Spring Security’s defaults, CSRF protection is turned on by default. This means that the actuator endpoints that require a POST (shutdown and loggers endpoints), PUT or DELETE will get a 403 forbidden error when the default security configuration is in use.

Additional information about CSRF protection can be found in the Spring Security Reference Guide.

It is often convenient to develop applications by using an in-memory embedded database. Obviously, in-memory databases do not provide persistent storage. You need to populate your database when your application starts and be prepared to throw away data when your application ends.

Spring Boot can auto-configure embedded H2, HSQL, and Derby databases. You need not provide any connection URLs. You need only include a build dependency to the embedded database that you want to use. If there are multiple embedded databases on the classpath, set the spring.datasource.embedded-database-connection configuration property to control which one is used. Setting the property to none disables auto-configuration of an embedded database.

For example, the typical POM dependencies would be as follows:

Production database connections can also be auto-configured by using a pooling DataSource.

DataSource configuration is controlled by external configuration properties in spring.datasource.*. For example, you might declare the following section in application.properties:

See DataSourceProperties for more of the supported options. These are the standard options that work regardless of the actual implementation. It is also possible to fine-tune implementation-specific settings by using their respective prefix (spring.datasource.hikari.*, spring.datasource.tomcat.*, spring.datasource.dbcp2.*, and spring.datasource.oracleucp.*). Refer to the documentation of the connection pool implementation you are using for more details.

For instance, if you use the Tomcat connection pool, you could customize many additional settings, as shown in the following example:

This will set the pool to wait 10000ms before throwing an exception if no connection is available, limit the maximum number of connections to 50 and validate the connection before borrowing it from the pool.

Spring Boot uses the following algorithm for choosing a specific implementation:

You can bypass that algorithm completely and specify the connection pool to use by setting the spring.datasource.type property. This is especially important if you run your application in a Tomcat container, as tomcat-jdbc is provided by default.

Additional connection pools can always be configured manually, using DataSourceBuilder. If you define your own DataSource bean, auto-configuration does not occur. The following connection pools are supported by DataSourceBuilder:

If you deploy your Spring Boot application to an Application Server, you might want to configure and manage your DataSource by using your Application Server’s built-in features and access it by using JNDI.

The spring.datasource.jndi-name property can be used as an alternative to the spring.datasource.url, spring.datasource.username, and spring.datasource.password properties to access the DataSource from a specific JNDI location. For example, the following section in application.properties shows how you can access a JBoss AS defined DataSource:

Traditionally, JPA “Entity” classes are specified in a persistence.xml file. With Spring Boot, this file is not necessary and “Entity Scanning” is used instead. By default, all packages below your main configuration class (the one annotated with @EnableAutoConfiguration or @SpringBootApplication) are searched.

Any classes annotated with @Entity, @Embeddable, or @MappedSuperclass are considered. A typical entity class resembles the following example:

Spring Data JPA repositories are interfaces that you can define to access data. JPA queries are created automatically from your method names. For example, a CityRepository interface might declare a findAllByState(String state) method to find all the cities in a given state.

For more complex queries, you can annotate your method with Spring Data’s Query annotation.

Spring Data repositories usually extend from the Repository or CrudRepository interfaces. If you use auto-configuration, repositories are searched from the package containing your main configuration class (the one annotated with @EnableAutoConfiguration or @SpringBootApplication) down.

The following example shows a typical Spring Data repository interface definition:

Spring Data JPA repositories support three different modes of bootstrapping: default, deferred, and lazy. To enable deferred or lazy bootstrapping, set the spring.data.jpa.repositories.bootstrap-mode property to deferred or lazy respectively. When using deferred or lazy bootstrapping, the auto-configured EntityManagerFactoryBuilder will use the context’s AsyncTaskExecutor, if any, as the bootstrap executor. If more than one exists, the one named applicationTaskExecutor will be used.

By default, JPA databases are automatically created only if you use an embedded database (H2, HSQL, or Derby). You can explicitly configure JPA settings by using spring.jpa.* properties. For example, to create and drop tables you can add the following line to your application.properties:

The line in the preceding example passes a value of true for the hibernate.globally_quoted_identifiers property to the Hibernate entity manager.

By default, the DDL execution (or validation) is deferred until the ApplicationContext has started. There is also a spring.jpa.generate-ddl flag, but it is not used if Hibernate auto-configuration is active, because the ddl-auto settings are more fine-grained.

If you are running a web application, Spring Boot by default registers OpenEntityManagerInViewInterceptor to apply the “Open EntityManager in View” pattern, to allow for lazy loading in web views. If you do not want this behavior, you should set spring.jpa.open-in-view to false in your application.properties.

By default, the console is available at /h2-console. You can customize the console’s path by using the spring.h2.console.path property.

H2 Console uses frames and, as it is intended for development only, does not implement CSRF protection measures. If your application uses Spring Security, you need to configure it to

More information on CSRF and the header X-Frame-Options can be found in the Spring Security Reference Guide.

In simple setups, a SecurityFilterChain like the following can be used:

In order to use jOOQ type-safe queries, you need to generate Java classes from your database schema. You can follow the instructions in the jOOQ user manual. If you use the jooq-codegen-maven plugin and you also use the spring-boot-starter-parent “parent POM”, you can safely omit the plugin’s <version> tag. You can also use Spring Boot-defined version variables (such as h2.version) to declare the plugin’s database dependency. The following listing shows an example:

The fluent API offered by jOOQ is initiated through the org.jooq.DSLContext interface. Spring Boot auto-configures a DSLContext as a Spring Bean and connects it to your application DataSource. To use the DSLContext, you can inject it, as shown in the following example:

You can then use the DSLContext to construct your queries, as shown in the following example:

Unless the spring.jooq.sql-dialect property has been configured, Spring Boot determines the SQL dialect to use for your datasource. If Spring Boot could not detect the dialect, it uses DEFAULT.

More advanced customizations can be achieved by defining your own DefaultConfigurationCustomizer bean that will be invoked prior to creating the org.jooq.Configuration @Bean. This takes precedence to anything that is applied by the auto-configuration.

You can also create your own org.jooq.Configuration @Bean if you want to take complete control of the jOOQ configuration.

Similarly to the JDBC support, Spring Boot can automatically configure an embedded database for reactive usage. You need not provide any connection URLs. You need only include a build dependency to the embedded database that you want to use, as shown in the following example:

A DatabaseClient bean is auto-configured, and you can @Autowire it directly into your own beans, as shown in the following example:

Spring Data R2DBC repositories are interfaces that you can define to access data. Queries are created automatically from your method names. For example, a CityRepository interface might declare a findAllByState(String state) method to find all the cities in a given state.

For more complex queries, you can annotate your method with Spring Data’s Query annotation.

Spring Data repositories usually extend from the Repository or CrudRepository interfaces. If you use auto-configuration, repositories are searched from the package containing your main configuration class (the one annotated with @EnableAutoConfiguration or @SpringBootApplication) down.

The following example shows a typical Spring Data repository interface definition:

You can inject an auto-configured RedisConnectionFactory, StringRedisTemplate, or vanilla RedisTemplate instance as you would any other Spring Bean. By default, the instance tries to connect to a Redis server at localhost:6379. The following listing shows an example of such a bean:

If you add your own @Bean of any of the auto-configured types, it replaces the default (except in the case of RedisTemplate, when the exclusion is based on the bean name, redisTemplate, not its type).

A pooled connection factory is auto-configured if commons-pool2 is on the classpath and at least one Pool option of RedisProperties is set.

To access MongoDB databases, you can inject an auto-configured org.springframework.data.mongodb.MongoDatabaseFactory. By default, the instance tries to connect to a MongoDB server at mongodb://localhost/test. The following example shows how to connect to a MongoDB database:

If you have defined your own MongoClient, it will be used to auto-configure a suitable MongoDatabaseFactory.

The auto-configured MongoClient is created using a MongoClientSettings bean. If you have defined your own MongoClientSettings, it will be used without modification and the spring.data.mongodb properties will be ignored. Otherwise a MongoClientSettings will be auto-configured and will have the spring.data.mongodb properties applied to it. In either case, you can declare one or more MongoClientSettingsBuilderCustomizer beans to fine-tune the MongoClientSettings configuration. Each will be called in order with the MongoClientSettings.Builder that is used to build the MongoClientSettings.

You can set the spring.data.mongodb.uri property to change the URL and configure additional settings such as the replica set, as shown in the following example:

Alternatively, you can specify connection details using discrete properties. For example, you might declare the following settings in your application.properties:

Spring Data MongoDB provides a MongoTemplate class that is very similar in its design to Spring’s JdbcTemplate. As with JdbcTemplate, Spring Boot auto-configures a bean for you to inject the template, as follows:

See the MongoOperations Javadoc for complete details.

Spring Data includes repository support for MongoDB. As with the JPA repositories discussed earlier, the basic principle is that queries are constructed automatically, based on method names.

In fact, both Spring Data JPA and Spring Data MongoDB share the same common infrastructure. You could take the JPA example from earlier and, assuming that City is now a MongoDB data class rather than a JPA @Entity, it works in the same way, as shown in the following example:

Spring Boot offers auto-configuration for Embedded Mongo. To use it in your Spring Boot application, add a dependency on de.flapdoodle.embed:de.flapdoodle.embed.mongo.

The port that Mongo listens on can be configured by setting the spring.data.mongodb.port property. To use a randomly allocated free port, use a value of 0. The MongoClient created by MongoAutoConfiguration is automatically configured to use the randomly allocated port.

If you have SLF4J on the classpath, the output produced by Mongo is automatically routed to a logger named org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.mongo.embedded.EmbeddedMongo.

You can declare your own IMongodConfig and IRuntimeConfig beans to take control of the Mongo instance’s configuration and logging routing. The download configuration can be customized by declaring a DownloadConfigBuilderCustomizer bean.

To access a Neo4j server, you can inject an auto-configured org.neo4j.driver.Driver. By default, the instance tries to connect to a Neo4j server at localhost:7687 using the Bolt protocol. The following example shows how to inject a Neo4j Driver that gives you access, amongst other things, to a Session:

You can configure various aspects of the driver using spring.neo4j.* properties. The following example shows how to configure the uri and credentials to use:

The auto-configured Driver is created using ConfigBuilder. To fine-tune its configuration, declare one or more ConfigBuilderCustomizer beans. Each will be called in order with the ConfigBuilder that is used to build the Driver.

Spring Data includes repository support for Neo4j. For complete details of Spring Data Neo4j, refer to the reference documentation.

Spring Data Neo4j shares the common infrastructure with Spring Data JPA as many other Spring Data modules do. You could take the JPA example from earlier and define City as Spring Data Neo4j @Node rather than JPA @Entity and the repository abstraction works in the same way, as shown in the following example:

The spring-boot-starter-data-neo4j “Starter” enables the repository support as well as transaction management. Spring Boot supports both classic and reactive Neo4j repositories, using the Neo4jTemplate or ReactiveNeo4jTemplate beans. When Project Reactor is available on the classpath, the reactive style is also auto-configured.

You can customize the locations to look for repositories and entities by using @EnableNeo4jRepositories and @EntityScan respectively on a @Configuration-bean.

You can inject an auto-configured SolrClient instance as you would any other Spring bean. By default, the instance tries to connect to a server at localhost:8983/solr. The following example shows how to inject a Solr bean:

If you add your own @Bean of type SolrClient, it replaces the default.

Elasticsearch ships two different REST clients that you can use to query a cluster: the "Low Level" client and the "High Level" client. Spring Boot provides support for the "High Level" client, which ships with org.elasticsearch.client:elasticsearch-rest-high-level-client.

If you have this dependency on the classpath, Spring Boot will auto-configure and register a RestHighLevelClient bean that by default targets localhost:9200. You can further tune how RestHighLevelClient is configured, as shown in the following example:

You can also register an arbitrary number of beans that implement RestClientBuilderCustomizer for more advanced customizations. To take full control over the registration, define a RestClientBuilder bean.

Additionally, if elasticsearch-rest-client-sniffer is on the classpath, a Sniffer is auto-configured to automatically discover nodes from a running Elasticsearch cluster and set them to the RestHighLevelClient bean. You can further tune how Sniffer is configured, as shown in the following example:

Spring Data Elasticsearch ships ReactiveElasticsearchClient for querying Elasticsearch instances in a reactive fashion. It is built on top of WebFlux’s WebClient, so both spring-boot-starter-elasticsearch and spring-boot-starter-webflux dependencies are useful to enable this support.

By default, Spring Boot will auto-configure and register a ReactiveElasticsearchClient bean that targets localhost:9200. You can further tune how it is configured, as shown in the following example:

If the configuration properties are not enough and you’d like to fully control the client configuration, you can register a custom ClientConfiguration bean.

To connect to Elasticsearch, a RestHighLevelClient bean must be defined, auto-configured by Spring Boot or manually provided by the application (see previous sections). With this configuration in place, an ElasticsearchRestTemplate can be injected like any other Spring bean, as shown in the following example:

In the presence of spring-data-elasticsearch and the required dependencies for using a WebClient (typically spring-boot-starter-webflux), Spring Boot can also auto-configure a ReactiveElasticsearchClient and a ReactiveElasticsearchTemplate as beans. They are the reactive equivalent of the other REST clients.

Spring Data includes repository support for Elasticsearch. As with the JPA repositories discussed earlier, the basic principle is that queries are constructed for you automatically based on method names.

In fact, both Spring Data JPA and Spring Data Elasticsearch share the same common infrastructure. You could take the JPA example from earlier and, assuming that City is now an Elasticsearch @Document class rather than a JPA @Entity, it works in the same way.

Spring Boot supports both classic and reactive Elasticsearch repositories, using the ElasticsearchRestTemplate or ReactiveElasticsearchTemplate beans. Most likely those beans are auto-configured by Spring Boot given the required dependencies are present.

If you wish to use your own template for backing the Elasticsearch repositories, you can add your own ElasticsearchRestTemplate or ElasticsearchOperations @Bean, as long as it is named "elasticsearchTemplate". Same applies to ReactiveElasticsearchTemplate and ReactiveElasticsearchOperations, with the bean name "reactiveElasticsearchTemplate".

You can choose to disable the repositories support with the following property:

You can inject an auto-configured CassandraTemplate or a Cassandra CqlSession instance as you would with any other Spring Bean. The spring.data.cassandra.* properties can be used to customize the connection. Generally, you provide keyspace-name and contact-points as well the local datacenter name, as shown in the following example:

If the port is the same for all your contact points you can use a shortcut and only specify the host names, as shown in the following example:

The following code listing shows how to inject a Cassandra bean:

If you add your own @Bean of type CassandraTemplate, it replaces the default.

Spring Data includes basic repository support for Cassandra. Currently, this is more limited than the JPA repositories discussed earlier and needs to annotate finder methods with @Query.

You can get a Cluster by adding the Couchbase SDK and some configuration. The spring.couchbase.* properties can be used to customize the connection. Generally, you provide the connection string, username, and password, as shown in the following example:

It is also possible to customize some of the ClusterEnvironment settings. For instance, the following configuration changes the timeout to use to open a new Bucket and enables SSL support:

Spring Data includes repository support for Couchbase. For complete details of Spring Data Couchbase, refer to the reference documentation.

You can inject an auto-configured CouchbaseTemplate instance as you would with any other Spring Bean, provided a CouchbaseClientFactory bean is available. This happens when a Cluster is available, as described above, and a bucket name has been specified:

The following examples shows how to inject a CouchbaseTemplate bean:

There are a few beans that you can define in your own configuration to override those provided by the auto-configuration:

To avoid hard-coding those names in your own config, you can reuse BeanNames provided by Spring Data Couchbase. For instance, you can customize the converters to use, as follows:

To connect to an LDAP server, make sure you declare a dependency on the spring-boot-starter-data-ldap “Starter” or spring-ldap-core and then declare the URLs of your server in your application.properties, as shown in the following example:

If you need to customize connection settings, you can use the spring.ldap.base and spring.ldap.base-environment properties.

An LdapContextSource is auto-configured based on these settings. If a DirContextAuthenticationStrategy bean is available, it is associated to the auto-configured LdapContextSource. If you need to customize it, for instance to use a PooledContextSource, you can still inject the auto-configured LdapContextSource. Make sure to flag your customized ContextSource as @Primary so that the auto-configured LdapTemplate uses it.

Spring Data includes repository support for LDAP. For complete details of Spring Data LDAP, refer to the reference documentation.

You can also inject an auto-configured LdapTemplate instance as you would with any other Spring Bean, as shown in the following example:

For testing purposes, Spring Boot supports auto-configuration of an in-memory LDAP server from UnboundID. To configure the server, add a dependency to com.unboundid:unboundid-ldapsdk and declare a spring.ldap.embedded.base-dn property, as follows:

By default, the server starts on a random port and triggers the regular LDAP support. There is no need to specify a spring.ldap.urls property.

If there is a schema.ldif file on your classpath, it is used to initialize the server. If you want to load the initialization script from a different resource, you can also use the spring.ldap.embedded.ldif property.

By default, a standard schema is used to validate LDIF files. You can turn off validation altogether by setting the spring.ldap.embedded.validation.enabled property. If you have custom attributes, you can use spring.ldap.embedded.validation.schema to define your custom attribute types or object classes.

Spring Boot auto-configures an InfluxDB instance, provided the influxdb-java client is on the classpath and the URL of the database is set, as shown in the following example:

If the connection to InfluxDB requires a user and password, you can set the spring.influx.user and spring.influx.password properties accordingly.

InfluxDB relies on OkHttp. If you need to tune the http client InfluxDB uses behind the scenes, you can register an InfluxDbOkHttpClientBuilderProvider bean.

If you need more control over the configuration, consider registering an InfluxDbCustomizer bean.

Generic caching is used if the context defines at least one org.springframework.cache.Cache bean. A CacheManager wrapping all beans of that type is created.

JCache is bootstrapped through the presence of a javax.cache.spi.CachingProvider on the classpath (that is, a JSR-107 compliant caching library exists on the classpath), and the JCacheCacheManager is provided by the spring-boot-starter-cache “Starter”. Various compliant libraries are available, and Spring Boot provides dependency management for Ehcache 3, Hazelcast, and Infinispan. Any other compliant library can be added as well.

It might happen that more than one provider is present, in which case the provider must be explicitly specified. Even if the JSR-107 standard does not enforce a standardized way to define the location of the configuration file, Spring Boot does its best to accommodate setting a cache with implementation details, as shown in the following example:

There are two ways to customize the underlying javax.cache.cacheManager:

EhCache 2.x is used if a file named ehcache.xml can be found at the root of the classpath. If EhCache 2.x is found, the EhCacheCacheManager provided by the spring-boot-starter-cache “Starter” is used to bootstrap the cache manager. An alternate configuration file can be provided as well, as shown in the following example: