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How AutoConfiguration works in Spring Boot

Understanding and extending spring boot with custom AutoConfiguration

Understanding and extending spring boot with custom AutoConfiguration

Everything in Spring Boot is configurable. This was very hard to understand, but here are some pointers that could help.

It was hard for me to extend and/or customize the core functionalities of Spring Boot. These are a few pointers that could help.

@Bean s

Beans can be thought of as singleton classes. i.e. classes where only one instance can exist.

@Beans are created and managed by BeanFactory. And there is a Bean injector which injects beans where they are needed.

So, for example, you have a class A and a class B.

class B is composed of class A, and you have added @Autowired to it.

When the class B bean is generated, the class A bean will be injected into it.

All @Component, @Service and @Repository are of type bean.

@Conditional s

Beans can be generated on conditions.

For example, suppose a particular library exists only then can a bean be generated.

For example, in spring-cloud stream, Kafka beans would be generated if there is Kafka set.

Everything would finally plugin to some lifecycle

All of spring, is a plugin architecture. The core of spring boot exists and everything else is a plugin that plugs into a spring boot lifecycle extending its core functionality.

Everything plugs into some spring boot lifecycle.

Extending spring boot

Suppose you want to extend spring boots to your liking here is how you’d do it.

Find all beans @Bean AutoConfiguration, @ConfigurationProperties and/or @Value

In IntelliJ, you can search usage for all Beans easily. These are the beans you can override.

Overriding these beans allows you to customize them.

Usually, Autoconfiguration classes end with the name AutoConfiguration, which makes them super easy to find.

Find ConfigurationProperties. Many beans depend on these or depend on @Value.

Configuration Properties and @Value are what is set by the properties file.

Read the documentation.

In the documentation, you will likely find info on some beans you could modify or extend.


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