Spring Boot in Action

By Craig Walls

Summary

A developer-focused guide to writing applications using Spring Boot. You'll learn how to bypass the tedious configuration steps so that you can concentrate on your application's behavior.

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

About the Technology
The Spring Framework simplifies enterprise Java development, but it does require lots of tedious configuration work. Spring Boot radically streamlines spinning up a Spring application. You get automatic configuration and a model with established conventions for build-time and runtime dependencies. You also get a handy command-line interface you can use to write scripts in Groovy. Developers who use Spring Boot often say that they can't imagine going back to hand configuring their applications.
About the Book

Spring Boot in Action is a developer-focused guide to writing applications using Spring Boot. In it, you'll learn how to bypass configuration steps so you can focus on your application's behavior. Spring expert Craig Walls uses interesting and practical examples to teach you both how to use the default settings effectively and how to override and customize Spring Boot for your unique environment. Along the way, you'll pick up insights from Craig's years of Spring development experience.

What's Inside

• Develop Spring apps more efficiently
• Minimal to no configuration
• Runtime metrics with the Actuator
• Covers Spring Boot 1.3

About the Reader

Written for readers familiar with the Spring Framework.

About the Author
Craig Walls is a software developer, author of the popular book Spring in Action, Fourth Edition, and a frequent speaker at conferences.
Table of Contents

1. Bootstarting Spring
2. Developing your first Spring Boot application
3. Customizing configuration
4. Testing with Spring Boot
5. Getting Groovy with the Spring Boot CLI
6. Applying Grails in Spring Boot
7. Taking a peek inside with the Actuator
8. Deploying Spring Boot applications
APPENDIXES

1. Spring Boot developer tools
2. Spring Boot starters
3. Configuration properties
4. Spring Boot dependencies

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manning
• Release date: Dec 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781638353584

Craig Walls

Craig Walls is an engineer at VMware, a member of the Spring engineering team, a popular author, and a frequent conference speaker.

Book preview

Copyright

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Brief Table of Contents

Copyright

Brief Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

About this Book

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. Bootstarting Spring

Chapter 2. Developing your first Spring Boot application

Chapter 3. Customizing configuration

Chapter 4. Testing with Spring Boot

Chapter 5. Getting Groovy with the Spring Boot CLI

Chapter 6. Applying Grails in Spring Boot

Chapter 7. Taking a peek inside with the Actuator

Chapter 8. Deploying Spring Boot applications

Appendix A. Spring Boot Developer Tools

Appendix B. Spring Boot starters

Appendix C. Configuration properties

Appendix D. Spring Boot dependencies

Index

List of Figures

List of Tables

List of Listings

Table of Contents

Copyright

Brief Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

About this Book

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. Bootstarting Spring

1.1. Spring rebooted

1.1.1. Taking a fresh look at Spring

1.1.2. Examining Spring Boot essentials

1.1.3. What Spring Boot isn’t

1.2. Getting started with Spring Boot

1.2.1. Installing the Spring Boot CLI

1.2.2. Initializing a Spring Boot project with Spring Initializr

1.3. Summary

Chapter 2. Developing your first Spring Boot application

2.1. Putting Spring Boot to work

2.1.1. Examining a newly initialized Spring Boot project

2.1.2. Dissecting a Spring Boot project build

2.2. Using starter dependencies

2.2.1. Specifying facet-based dependencies

2.2.2. Overriding starter transitive dependencies

2.3. Using automatic configuration

2.3.1. Focusing on application functionality

2.3.2. Running the application

2.3.3. What just happened?

2.4. Summary

Chapter 3. Customizing configuration

3.1. Overriding Spring Boot auto-configuration

3.1.1. Securing the application

3.1.2. Creating a custom security configuration

3.1.3. Taking another peek under the covers of auto-configuration

3.2. Externalizing configuration with properties

3.2.1. Fine-tuning auto-configuration

3.2.2. Externally configuring application beans

3.2.3. Configuring with profiles

3.3. Customizing application error pages

3.4. Summary

Chapter 4. Testing with Spring Boot

4.1. Integration testing auto-configuration

4.2. Testing web applications

4.2.1. Mocking Spring MVC

4.2.2. Testing web security

4.3. Testing a running application

4.3.1. Starting the server on a random port

4.3.2. Testing HTML pages with Selenium

4.4. Summary

Chapter 5. Getting Groovy with the Spring Boot CLI

5.1. Developing a Spring Boot CLI application

5.1.1. Setting up the CLI project

5.1.2. Eliminating code noise with Groovy

5.1.3. What just happened?

5.2. Grabbing dependencies

5.2.1. Overriding default dependency versions

5.2.2. Adding dependency repositories

5.3. Running tests with the CLI

5.4. Creating a deployable artifact

5.5. Summary

Chapter 6. Applying Grails in Spring Boot

6.1. Using GORM for data persistence

6.2. Defining views with Groovy Server Pages

6.3. Mixing Spring Boot with Grails 3

6.3.1. Creating a new Grails project

6.3.2. Defining the domain

6.3.3. Writing a Grails controller

6.3.4. Creating the view

6.4. Summary

Chapter 7. Taking a peek inside with the Actuator

7.1. Exploring the Actuator’s endpoints

7.1.1. Viewing configuration details

7.1.2. Tapping runtime metrics

7.1.3. Shutting down the application

7.1.4. Fetching application information

7.2. Connecting to the Actuator remote shell

7.2.1. Viewing the autoconfig report

7.2.2. Listing application beans

7.2.3. Watching application metrics

7.2.4. Invoking Actuator endpoints

7.3. Monitoring your application with JMX

7.4. Customizing the Actuator

7.4.1. Changing endpoint IDs

7.4.2. Enabling and disabling endpoints

7.4.3. Adding custom metrics and gauges

7.4.4. Creating a custom trace repository

7.4.5. Plugging in custom health indicators

7.5. Securing Actuator endpoints

7.6. Summary

Chapter 8. Deploying Spring Boot applications

8.1. Weighing deployment options

8.2. Deploying to an application server

8.2.1. Building a WAR file

8.2.2. Creating a production profile

8.2.3. Enabling database migration

8.3. Pushing to the cloud

8.3.1. Deploying to Cloud Foundry

8.3.2. Deploying to Heroku

8.4. Summary

Appendix A. Spring Boot Developer Tools

Automatic restart

LiveReload

Remote development

Development property defaults

Globally configuring developer tools

Appendix B. Spring Boot starters

Appendix C. Configuration properties

Appendix D. Spring Boot dependencies

Index

List of Figures

List of Tables

List of Listings

Foreword

In the spring of 2014, the Delivery Engineering team at Netflix set out to achieve a lofty goal: enable end-to-end global continuous delivery via a software platform that facilitates both extensibility and resiliency. My team had previously built two different applications attempting to address Netflix’s delivery and deployment needs, but both were beginning to show the telltale signs of monolith-ness and neither met the goals of flexibility and resiliency. What’s more, the most stymieing effect of these monolithic applications was ultimately that we were unable to keep pace with our partner’s innovation. Users had begun to move around our tools rather than with them.

It became apparent that if we wanted to provide real value to the company and rapidly innovate, we needed to break up the monoliths into small, independent services that could be released at will. Embracing a microservice architecture gave us hope that we could also address the twin goals of flexibility and resiliency. But we needed to do it on a credible foundation where we could count on real concurrency, legitimate monitoring, reliable and easy service discovery, and great runtime performance.

With the JVM as our bedrock, we looked for a framework that would give us rapid velocity and steadfast operationalization out of the box. We zeroed in on Spring Boot.

Spring Boot makes it effortless to create Spring-powered, production-ready services without a lot of code! Indeed, the fact that a simple Spring Boot Hello World application can fit into a tweet is a radical departure from what the same functionality required on the JVM only a few short years ago. Out-of-the-box nonfunctional features like security, metrics, health-checks, embedded servers, and externalized configuration made Boot an easy choice for us.

Yet, when we embarked on our Spring Boot journey, solid documentation was hard to come by. Relying on source code isn’t the most joyful manner of figuring out how to properly leverage a framework’s features.

It’s not surprising to see the author of Manning’s venerable Spring in Action take on the challenge of concisely distilling the core aspects of working with Spring Boot into another cogent book. Nor is it surprising that Craig and the Manning crew have done another tremendously wonderful job! Spring Boot in Action is an easily readable book, as we’ve now come to expect from Craig and Manning.

From chapter 1’s attention-getting introduction to Boot and the now legendary 90ish-character tweetable Boot application to an in-depth analysis of Boot’s Actuator in chapter 7, which enables a host of auto-magical operational features required for any production application, Spring Boot in Action leaves no stone unturned. Indeed, for me, chapter 7’s deep dive into the Actuator answered some of the lingering questions I’ve had in the back of my head since picking up Boot well over a year ago. Chapter 8’s thorough examination of deployment options opened my eyes to the simplicity of Cloud Foundry for cloud deployments. One of my favorite chapters is chapter 4, where Craig explores the many powerful options for easily testing a Boot application. From the get-go, I was pleasantly surprised with some of Spring’s testing features, and Boot takes advantage of them nicely.

As I’ve publicly stated before, Spring Boot is just the kind of framework the Java community has been seeking for over a decade. Its easy-to-use development features and out-of-the-box operationalization make Java development fun again. I’m pleased to report that Spring and Spring Boot are the foundation of Netflix’s new continuous delivery platform. What’s more, other teams at Netflix are following the same path because they too see the myriad benefits of Boot.

It’s with equal parts excitement and passion that I absolutely endorse Craig’s book as the easy-to-digest and fun-to-read Spring Boot documentation the Java community has been waiting for since Boot took the community by storm. Craig’s accessible writing style and sweeping analysis of Boot’s core features and functionality will surely leave readers with a solid grasp of Boot (along with a joyful sense of awe for it).

Keep up the great work Craig, Manning Publications, and all the brilliant developers who have made Spring Boot what it is today! Each one of you has ensured a bright future for the JVM.

ANDREW GLOVER

MANAGER, DELIVERY ENGINEERING AT NETFLIX

Preface

At the 1964 New York World’s Fair, Walt Disney introduced three groundbreaking attractions: it’s a small world, Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, and the Carousel of Progress. All three of these attractions have since moved into Disneyland and Walt Disney World, and you can still see them today.

My favorite of these is the Carousel of Progress. Supposedly, it was one of Walt Disney’s favorites too. It’s part ride and part stage show where the seating area rotates around a center area featuring four stages. Each stage tells the story of a family at different time periods of the 20th century—the early 1900s, the 1920s, the 1940s, and recent times—highlighting the technology advances in that time period. The story of innovation is told from a hand-cranked washing machine, to electric lighting and radio, to automatic dishwashers and television, to computers and voice-activated appliances.

In every act, the father (who is also the narrator of the show) talks about the latest inventions and says It can’t get any better, only to discover that, in fact, it does get better in the next act as technology progresses.

Although Spring doesn’t have quite as long a history as that displayed in the Carousel of Progress, I feel the same way about Spring as Progress Dad felt about the 20th century. Each and every Spring application seems to make the lives of developers so much better. Just looking at how Spring components are declared and wired together, we can see the following progression over the history of Spring:

When Spring 1.0 hit the scene, it completely changed how we develop enterprise Java applications. Spring dependency injection and declarative transactions meant no more tight coupling of components and no more heavyweight EJBs. It couldn’t get any better.

With Spring 2.0 we could use custom XML namespaces for configuration, making Spring itself even easier to use with smaller and easier to understand configuration files. It couldn’t get any better.

Spring 2.5 gave us a much more elegant annotation-oriented dependency-injection model with the @Component and @Autowired annotations, as well as an annotation-oriented Spring MVC programming model. No more explicit declaration of application components, and no more subclassing one of several base controller classes. It couldn’t get any better.

Then with Spring 3.0 we were given a new Java-based configuration alternative to XML that was improved further in Spring 3.1 with a variety of @Enable-prefixed annotations. For the first time, it become realistic to write a complete Spring application with no XML configuration whatsoever. It couldn’t get any better.

Spring 4.0 unleashed support for conditional configuration, where runtime decisions would determine which configuration would be used and which would be ignored based on the application’s classpath, environment, and other factors. We no longer needed to write scripts to make those decisions at build time and pick which configuration should be included in the deployment. How could it possibly get any better?

And then came Spring Boot. Even though with each release of Spring we thought it couldn’t possibly get any better, Spring Boot proved that there’s still a lot of magic left in Spring. In fact, I believe Spring Boot is the most significant and exciting thing to happen in Java development in a long time.

Building upon previous advances in the Spring Framework, Spring Boot enables automatic configuration, making it possible for Spring to intelligently detect what kind of application you’re building and automatically configure the components necessary to support the application’s needs. There’s no need to write explicit configuration for common configuration scenarios; Spring will take care of it for you.

Spring Boot starter dependencies make it even easier to select which build-time and runtime libraries to include in your application builds by aggregating commonly needed dependencies. Spring Boot starters not only keep the dependencies section of your build specifications shorter, they keep you from having to think too hard about the specific libraries and versions you need.

Spring Boot’s command-line interface offers a compelling option for developing Spring applications in Groovy with minimal noise or ceremony common in Java applications. With the Spring Boot CLI, there’s no need for accessor methods, access modifiers such as public or private, semicolons, or the return keyword. In many cases, you can even eliminate import statements. And because you run the application as scripts from the command line, you don’t need a build specification.

Spring Boot’s Actuator gives you insight into the inner workings of a running application. You can see exactly what beans are in the Spring application context, how Spring MVC controllers are mapped to paths, the configuration properties available to your application, and much more.

With all of these wonderful features enabled by Spring Boot, it certainly can’t get any better!

In this book, you’ll see how Spring Boot has indeed made Spring even better than it was before. We’ll look at auto-configuration, Spring Boot starters, the Spring Boot CLI, and the Actuator. And we’ll tinker with the latest version of Grails, which is based on Spring Boot. By the time we’re done, you’ll probably be thinking that Spring couldn’t get any better.

If we’ve learned anything from Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress, it’s that when we think things can’t get any better, they inevitably do get better. Already, the advances offered by Spring Boot are being leveraged to enable even greater advances. It’s hard to imagine Spring getting any better than it is now, but it certainly will. With Spring, there’s always a great big beautiful tomorrow.

About this Book

Spring Boot aims to simplify Spring development. As such, Spring Boot’s reach stretches to touch everything that Spring touches. It’d be impossible to write a book that covers every single way that Spring Boot can be used, as doing so would involve covering every single technology that Spring itself supports. Instead, Spring Boot in Action aims to distill Spring Boot into four main topics: auto-configuration, starter dependencies, the command-line interface, and the Actuator. Along the way, we’ll touch on a few Spring features as necessary, but the focus will be primarily on Spring Boot.

Spring Boot in Action is for all Java developers. Although some background in Spring could be considered a prerequisite, Spring Boot has a way of making Spring more approachable even to those new to Spring. Nevertheless, because this book will be focused on Spring Boot and will not dive deeply into Spring itself, you may find it helpful to pair it with other Spring materials such as Spring in Action, Fourth Edition (Manning, 2014).

Roadmap

Spring Boot in Action is divided into seven chapters:

In chapter 1 you’ll be given an overview of Spring Boot, including the essentials of automatic configuration, starter dependencies, the command-line interface, and the Actuator.

Chapter 2 takes a deeper dive into Spring Boot, focusing on automatic configuration and starter dependencies. In this chapter, you’ll build a complete Spring application using very little explicit configuration.

Chapter 3 picks up where chapter 2 leaves off, showing how you can influence automatic configuration by setting application properties or completely overriding automatic configuration when it doesn’t meet your needs.

In chapter 4 we’ll look at how to write automated integration tests for Spring Boot applications.

In chapter 5 you’ll see how the Spring Boot CLI offers a compelling alternative to conventional Java development by enabling you to write complete applications as a set of Groovy scripts that are run from the command line.

While we’re on the subject of Groovy, chapter 6 takes a look at Grails 3, the latest version of the Grails framework, which is now based on Spring Boot.

In chapter 7 you’ll see how to leverage Spring Boot’s Actuator to dig inside of a running application and see what makes it tick. You’ll see how to use Actuator web endpoints as well as a remote shell and JMX MBeans to peek at the internals of an application.

Chapter 8 wraps things up by discussing various options for deploying your Spring Boot application, including traditional application server deployment and cloud deployment.

Code conventions and downloads

There are many code examples throughout this book. These examples will always appear in a fixed-width code font like this. Any class name, method name, or XML fragment within the normal text of the book will appear in code font as well. Many of Spring’s classes and packages have exceptionally long (but expressive) names. Because of this, line-continuation markers ( ) may be included when necessary. Not all code examples in this book will be complete. Often I only show a method or two from a class to focus on a particular topic.

Complete source code for the applications found in the book can be downloaded from the publisher’s website at www.manning.com/books/spring-boot-in-action.

Author Online

The purchase of Spring Boot in Action includes free access to a private web forum run by Manning Publications, where you can make comments about the book, ask technical questions, and receive help from the author and from other users. To access the forum and subscribe to it, point your web browser to www.manning.com/books/spring-boot-in-action. This page provides information on how to get on the forum once you are registered, what kind of help is available, and the rules of conduct on the forum.

Manning’s commitment to our readers is to provide a venue where a meaningful dialogue between individual readers and between readers and the author can take place. It is not a commitment to any specific amount of participation on the part of the author whose contribution to the forum remains voluntary (and unpaid). We suggest you try asking the author some challenging questions lest his interest stray!

The Author Online forum and the archives of previous discussions will be accessible from the publisher’s website as long as the book is in print.

About the cover illustration

The figure on the cover of Spring Boot in Action is captioned Habit of a Tartar in Kasan, which is the capital city of the Republic of Tatarstan in Russia. The illustration is taken from Thomas Jefferys’ A Collection of the Dresses of Different Nations, Ancient and Modern (four volumes), London, published between 1757 and 1772. The title page states that these are hand-colored copperplate engravings, heightened with gum arabic. Thomas Jefferys (1719–1771) was called Geographer to King George III. He was an English cartographer who was the leading map supplier of his day. He engraved and printed maps for government and other official bodies and produced a wide range of commercial maps and atlases, especially of North America. His work as a mapmaker sparked an interest in local dress customs of the lands he surveyed and mapped, which are brilliantly displayed in this collection.

Fascination with faraway lands and travel for pleasure were relatively new phenomena in the late eighteenth century, and collections such as this one were popular, introducing both the tourist as well as