Spring Boot 1.3.0 M2 Release Notes

v1.3.0 M1

Upgrading from Spring Boot 1.3.0 M1

See instructions in the 1.3.0.M1 release notes for upgrading from v1.2.

Property renames

The following application.properties keys have been renamed to improve consistency:

spring.view. to spring.mvc.view.
spring.pidfile to spring.pid.file
server.session-timeout to server.session.timeout
spring.oauth2. to security.oauth2.

HTTP response compression

Spring Boot 1.2 supported native response compression for Tomcat users, or compression using Jetty’s GZipFilter for users of Jetty, Tomcat, and Undertow. Motivated by the Jetty team’s deprecation of their gzip filter, Spring Boot 1.3 replaces this with support for native response compression in all three embedded containers. As a result the server.tomcat.compression. and spring.http.gzip. properties are no longer supported. The new server.compression.* properties should be used instead.

Logging

Spring specific configuration

In order to prevent double initialization Spring specific log configuration files can now be used. It’s recommended (although not required) that you rename any default log configuration files to use a -spring suffix. For example logback.xml would change to logback-spring.xml.

Initialization failures

In Spring Boot 1.2, if you specified a custom logging configuration file using logging.config and the file did not exist, it would silently fallback to using the default configuration. Spring Boot 1.3 fails due to the missing file. Similarly, if you provided a custom Logback configuration file which was malformed, Spring Boot 1.2 would fall back to its default configuration. Spring Boot 1.3 fails and reports the problems with the configuration to System.err.

Groovy templating

The GroovyTemplateProperties class now extends AbstractTemplateViewResolverProperties and provides additional configuration options. If you currently define a prefix.spring.groovy.template.prefix property to define a custom resource location you should rename it to prefix.spring.groovy.resource-loader-location.

Security for the /health endpoint

The security settings for what information is visible on the actuator /health endpoint have been tweaked a little to provide better consistency. See the HTTP health endpoint access restrictions section in the reference guide for complete details.

Deprecations in Spring Boot 1.3.0 M2

The protected SpringApplication.afterRefresh method that takes a String[] has been deprecated in favor of a version that takes ApplicationArguments.

New and Noteworthy

Tip	Check the configuration changelog for a complete overview of the changes in configuration.

jOOQ Support

Auto-configuration is now provided for jOOQ. You can @Autowire a jOOQ DSLContext directly into your Spring Beans to create type safe database queries. Additional customization is supported via spring.jooq.* application properties.

See the "Using jOOQ" section of the reference documentation for details.

Application arguments

You can now implement the ApplicationRunner interface as an alternative to CommandLineRunner. This works in the same way but provides arguments as a ApplicationArguments interface rather than a String[]. You can also inject ApplicationArguments directly into any existing bean if you need to access the application arguments.

The ApplicationArguments interface provides convenience methods for accessing "option" and "non-option" arguments. For example:

@Autowired
public MyBean(ApplicationArguments args) {
    boolean debug = args.containsOption("debug");
    List<String> files = args.getNonOptionArgs();
    // if run with "--debug logfile.txt" debug=true, files=["logfile.txt"]
}

See Accessing application arguments for details.

ANSI color banner.txt files

You can now use ANSI placeholders in your banner.txt file to produce color output. Any ${Ansi.}, ${AnsiColor.}, ${AnsiBackground.} or ${AnsiStyle.} properties will be expanded. For example

${AnsiColor.BRIGHT_GREEN}My Application
${AnsiColor.BRIGHT_YELLOW}${application.formatted-version}${AnsiColor.DEFAULT}

Default profile application.properties

The -default suffix is now considered when loading application.properties (and application.yml) files when no specific profile is active. This can be helpful when you use profiles to indicate deployment environments, for example:

File	Description
`application.properties`	Shared properties that are always loaded
`application-prod.properties`	Properties loaded when the `prod` profile is active.
`application-staging.properties`	Properties loaded when the `staging` profile is active.
`application-default.properties`	Properties loaded when no profile is active.

Hypermedia for MVC actuator endpoints

Actuator HTTP endpoints are now enhanced with hypermedia links when you have Spring HATEOAS on your classpath (for example via spring-boot-starter-hateoas). A new "discovery page" is also provided with links to all actuator endpoints. Support is also provided for the HAL browser if its webjar is on the classpath.

See the "Hypermedia for MVC Endpoints" reference section for more details.

Actuator docs endpoint

A new spring-boot-actuator-docs modules is provided with Spring Boot 1.3 which allows actuator documentation to be embedded into your application. Once the modules is on your classpath you can hit /docs to get information about the actuator endpoints including a sample of the data that each endpoint returns.

New actuator endpoints

The following additional actuator endpoints have been added with Spring Boot 1.3:

Name	Description
`/logfile`	Provides access to the log file (if one has been configured).
`/flyway`	Provides details of any Flyway database migrations that have been applied.
`/liquibase`	Provides details of any Liquibase database migrations that have been applied.

Spring Session

With Spring Session and Spring Data Redis on the classpath, web applications will now be auto-configured to store user sessions in Redis. See the accompanying sample for more information.

Spring resource chains

You can now configure basic aspects of Spring’s ResourceChainRegistration via application properties. This allows you to create unique resource names so that you can implement cache busting. The spring.resources.chain.strategy.content. properties can be used to configure fingerprinting based on the content of the resource; and spring.resources.chain.strategy.fixed. properties can be used if you want to use a "fixed version" for your fingerprint.

Logback extensions

Spring Boot 1.3 supports some new tags which can be used in your logback configuration file. To use the tags you need to first rename any logback.xml configuration to logback-spring.xml. Once your configuration file has been renamed, the following tags are available.

Tag	Description
`<springProfile>`	Allows you to optionally include or exclude sections of configuration based on the active Spring profiles.
`<springProperty>`	Allows you to surface properties from the Spring Environment for use within Logback.

See the Logback extensions section of the reference documentation for more details.

HTTP Session configuration

Additional properties are now provided for session configuration. You can use server.session.* properties to configure "tracking modes" and "cookie" details.

Artemis auto-configuration

Apache Artemis was formed in 2015 when HornetQ was donated to the Apache Foundation. As of Spring Boot 1.3, Apache Artemis is fully supported and can be used in pretty much the same way as HornetQ. If you are migrating to Artemis you should rename any spring.hornetq. properties to spring.artemis..

Configuration property meta-data updates

The META-INF/spring-configuration-metadata.json file format has been updated to support a new hints attribute. This can be used by IDE developers to provided better content assist support. See the updated appendix for details.

Fully executable JARs and service support

The fully executable JAR support introduced in 1.3.0.M1 has been updated to allow .conf files to be used for customization. See the updated customizing the startup script section of the reference documentation for details.

JDBC

Spring Boot will now automatically infer the driver class name from the JDBC URL for the following databases:

DB2
Firebird
Teradata

Ant Support

Spring Boot now includes an AntLib module to help you create executable jars from Ant. See the "Spring Boot AntLib module" section in the reference docs.

Miscellaneous

The following miscellaneous updates are also include with Spring Boot 1.3:

A new SpringBootVersion class has been added (similar to SpringVersion from the core framework).
You can now used hamcrest matchers with OutputCapture to verify tests produce certain output.
You can now configure Spring Boot to use Elasticsearch non local nodes.
The ApplicationPidFileWriter can now throw an exception if a fail-on-write-error property is set (see the updated javadoc).
The Maven plugin now includes a useTestClasspath option for use with spring-boot:run.
Extra database heath queries are now provided for DB2 and Informix.