12. Adding GIT release information

In the previous post, we saw how to enable actuator endpoints on our spring server. Once we have done that, it is a good idea to add GIT release information to the server in order to get the information related to the currently deployed server at runtime.
We add the git-commit-id-plugin to our pom.xml.

   <plugin>
    <groupid>pl.project13.maven</groupid>
    <artifactid>git-commit-id-plugin</artifactid>
    <version>2.2.1</version>
   </plugin>

The next things to do is to create a git.properties file in the resource directory of the project.

The git-commit-id is added by the maven plugin so it is a good idea to build the project using maven.

$ mvn clean package -DskipTests

Now we can run the server and check the /manage/info endpoint using curl command.

$ curl -X GET http://localhost:9091/manage/info
{"git":{"branch":"master","commit":{"id":"6fb94c0","time":1549868235.000000000}}

11. Spring Actuators

Spring provides actuators that are a helpful set of tools to debug the application on runtime. Here is how to enable them. We first add actuator dependency in the pom.xml

<dependency>
  <groupid>org.springframework.boot</groupid>
  <artifactid>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactid>
</dependency>

Now we define a prefix for all the actuator endpoints. We add the following line into the application.properties file. This enables all the actuator endpoints. We can enable specific endpoints by adding a comma delimited list of endpoints. We also deploy management endpoint on a separate port so that we can block its access from something like ELB.

management.endpoints.web.base-path=/manage
management.server.port=9091
management.endpoints.web.exposure.include=*

Since we already have a security filter defined, we need to exempt health and info endpoint from security check. We add the following URLs int he SecurityConfiguration configure method.

@Override
    public void configure(WebSecurity web) throws Exception {
        web.ignoring().antMatchers("/manage/health");
        web.ignoring().antMatchers("/manage/info");
        web.ignoring().antMatchers("/webjars/**");
        web.ignoring().antMatchers("/error");
        web.ignoring().antMatchers("/swagger-ui.html");
        web.ignoring().antMatchers("/v2/api-docs/**");
        web.ignoring().antMatchers("/swagger-resources/**");
    }

Here we have added paths related to error, actuator, and swagger.
This enables actuator endpoints for our server. We can query these endpoints and following is the sample response.

$ curl -X GET http://localhost:9091/manage/health
{"status":"UP"}