Spring Boot 2.4.0 RC1 Release Notes

For changes in earlier milestones, please refer to:

Upgrading from Spring Boot 2.3

Deprecations from Spring Boot 2.3

Reflecting Spring Boot 2.4’s move to a 6-month release cadence, code deprecated in Spring Boot 2.3 will not be removed until Spring Boot 2.5.

Embedded database detection

The embedded database logic has been refined to consider a database as embedded only if it is in-memory. This change has two consequences if you’re using file-based persistence or server mode with H2, HSQL and Derby:

The sa username is no longer set. If you were relying on that behaviour, you’d need to set spring.datasource.username=sa in your configuration.
Such database won’t be initialised on startup anymore as they are no longer considered as embedded. You can always tune this using spring.datasource.initialization-mode.

Minimum requirements changes

None.

New and Noteworthy

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

Spring Framework 5.3

This release candidate upgrades Spring Framework to version 5.3. Please refer to this blog post to learn more.

Spring Data 2020.0

This release candidate upgrades the Spring Data release train to version 2020.0 (code-named Ockham). Please refer to this blog post to learn more.

Web Configuration Properties

Properties have been added to support configuration of the web locale and resource locations with either Spring MVC or Spring WebFlux. The new properties are:

spring.web.locale
spring.web.locale-resolver
spring.web.resources.*

A new property has been added to support configuration of the actuators management endpoint with either the servlet or reactive web stack:

management.server.base-path

These Spring MVC and servlet specific properties have been deprecated in favor of the new properties that support either web stack:

spring.mvc.locale
spring.mvc.locale-resolver
spring.resources.*
management.server.servlet.context-path

Register @WebListeners in a way that allows them to register servlets and filters

Servlet @WebLister classes are now registered in such a way that they may themselves register servlets and filters.

Earlier versions of Spring Boot registered them using a call to javax.servlet.Registration.Dynamic. This meant that the following section of Servlet specification (4.4) applied:

If the ServletContext passed to the ServletContextListener’s contextInitialized method where the ServletContextListener was neither declared in web.xml or web-fragment.xml nor annotated with @WebListener then an UnsupportedOperationException MUST be thrown for all the methods defined in ServletContext for programmatic configuration of servlets, filters and listeners.

As of Spring Boot 2.4, we no longer use dynamic registration and so it’s safe to call event.getServletContext().addServlet(…) and event.getServletContext.addFilter(…) from a ServletContextListener.contextInitialized method.

Config Data

When importing configuration from a config tree using spring.config.import: configtree:…, wildcards can now be used to import multiple config trees from the same parent folder. Please refer to the external configuration documentation for more details.

Properties loaded from config trees now have trailing newline characters trimmed by default.

Maven Buildpack Support

The spring-boot:build-image Maven goal now puts all project modules dependencies in the "application" layer. This means that if you have multiple project modules in your build, they will now all end up in the same layer.

The XML schema has also been updated to allow the layer to be customized using new <includeModuleDependencies/> and <excludeModuleDependencies/> elements.

See the updated Maven documentation for details.

Spring Security SAML Configuration Properties

Properties have been added to allow configuration of a SAML2 relying party registration’s decryption credentials and Assertion Consumer Service (ACS). The properties are under the following headings:

Logback Configuration Properties

Logging properties that are specific to Logback have been renamed to reflect the fact that they are Logback-specific. The previous names have been deprecated.

The following Spring Boot properties have been changed:

logging.pattern.rolling-file-name → logging.logback.rollingpolicy.file-name-pattern
logging.file.clean-history-on-start → logging.logback.rollingpolicy.clean-history-on-start
logging.file.max-size → logging.logback.rollingpolicy.max-file-size
logging.file.total-size-cap → logging.logback.rollingpolicy.total-size-cap
logging.file.max-history → logging.logback.rollingpolicy.max-history

As have the system environment properties that they map to:

ROLLING_FILE_NAME_PATTERN → LOGBACK_ROLLINGPOLICY_FILE_NAME_PATTERN
LOG_FILE_CLEAN_HISTORY_ON_START → LOGBACK_ROLLINGPOLICY_CLEAN_HISTORY_ON_START
LOG_FILE_MAX_SIZE → LOGBACK_ROLLINGPOLICY_MAX_FILE_SIZE
LOG_FILE_TOTAL_SIZE_CAP → LOGBACK_ROLLINGPOLICY_TOTAL_SIZE_CAP
LOG_FILE_MAX_HISTORY → LOGBACK_ROLLINGPOLICY_MAX_HISTORY

Miscellaneous

The charsets used to by Logback and Log4j logging can now be configured using the properties logging.charset.console and logging.charset.file.
Gradle’s configuration cache is supported when using Gradle 6.7 or later to build a Spring Boot application.