Spring Boot comes with interesting features, one of which is to provide production ready, stand-alone application (embeds web server) with built-in monitoring and debugging facilities out-of-the-box.  This enables immutable container deployment units that can help with continuous deployment at scale.

Impressed by the above, I converted a spring mvc based webservice to a spring boot application. Things I did included adding the following dependencies to pom.xml, removing the existing spring-context and spring-webmvc dependencies, changing the packaging to jar from war and providing a starter class that wires up spring boot and spring. Viola – got endpoints that allow me to look at config, url to controller mapping/documentation, take thread dumps, health check, access logs and more, click here for endpoints documentation.

<parent>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
<version>1.3.3.RELEASE</version>
</parent>
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>
<scope>test</scope>
</dependency>

...

<plugin>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
</plugin>

Starter class looks like this:

@SpringBootApplication
public class Application {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
    }
}

In case, if you want to leverage the monitoring and debugging features for an existing war application, the following maven pom additions are required in addition to retaining packaging to war.

<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-tomcat</artifactId>
<scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>