Integration Keep Alive

Starting with version 6.4, Spring Integration provides an IntegrationKeepAlive infrastructure bean. It manages an spring-integration-keep-alive non-daemon forever thread which keeps an application running. In some use-cases, e.g. WebSocketInboundChannelAdapter based on the StandardWebSocketClient does not use non-daemon thread for session, therefore an application may exit prematurely. Or an application logic may have only service activators or outbound channel adapters which rely on some other interaction, but not loops from executors like the one from Web server. Or all the threads in the application are virtual.

The IntegrationKeepAlive is started automatically only if TaskScheduler is configured for non-daemon threads and there is no AbstractPollingEndpoint beans in the application context. In case of the TaskScheduler bean configured for daemon or virtual threads, the IntegrationKeepAlive is started regardless of the presence for AbstractPollingEndpoint beans.

This component can be disabled by the spring.integration.keepAlive global property. See Global Properties for more information. The IntegrationKeepAlive can be injected in some service and stopped manually if there is no need to keep an application alive or such a status is managed somewhere else.

See also Spring Boot Virtual Threads documentation for a spring.main.keep-alive property.