How to shutdown a Spring Boot Application in a correct way?

In the Spring Boot Document, they said that 'Each SpringApplication will register a shutdown hook with the JVM to ensure that the ApplicationContext is closed gracefully on exit.'

When I click ctrl+c on the shell command, the application can be shutdown gracefully. If I run the application in a production machine, I have to use the command java -jar ProApplicaton.jar. But I can't close the shell terminal, otherwise it will close the process.

If I run command like nohup java -jar ProApplicaton.jar &, I can't use ctrl+c to shutdown it gracefully.

What is the correct way to start and stop a Spring Boot Application in the production environment?


If you are using the actuator module, you can shutdown the application via JMX or HTTP if the endpoint is enabled.

add to application.properties:

endpoints.shutdown.enabled=true

Following URL will be available:

/actuator/shutdown - Allows the application to be gracefully shutdown (not enabled by default).

Depending on how an endpoint is exposed, the sensitive parameter may be used as a security hint.

For example, sensitive endpoints will require a username/password when they are accessed over HTTP (or simply disabled if web security is not enabled).

From the Spring boot documentation


Here is another option that does not require you to change the code or exposing a shut-down endpoint. Create the following scripts and use them to start and stop your app.

start.sh

#!/bin/bash
java -jar myapp.jar & echo $! > ./pid.file &

Starts your app and saves the process id in a file

stop.sh

#!/bin/bash
kill $(cat ./pid.file)

Stops your app using the saved process id

start_silent.sh

#!/bin/bash
nohup ./start.sh > foo.out 2> foo.err < /dev/null &

If you need to start the app using ssh from a remote machine or a CI pipeline then use this script instead to start your app. Using start.sh directly can leave the shell to hang.

After eg. re/deploying your app you can restart it using:

sshpass -p password ssh -oStrictHostKeyChecking=no [email protected] 'cd /home/user/pathToApp; ./stop.sh; ./start_silent.sh'

As to @Jean-Philippe Bond 's answer ,

here is a maven quick example for maven user to configure HTTP endpoint to shutdown a spring boot web app using spring-boot-starter-actuator so that you can copy and paste:

1.Maven pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId>
</dependency>

2.application.properties:

#No auth  protected 
endpoints.shutdown.sensitive=false

#Enable shutdown endpoint
endpoints.shutdown.enabled=true

All endpoints are listed here:

3.Send a post method to shutdown the app:

curl -X POST localhost:port/shutdown

Security Note:

if you need the shutdown method auth protected, you may also need

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>
</dependency>

configure details:


You can make the springboot application to write the PID into file and you can use the pid file to stop or restart or get the status using a bash script. To write the PID to a file, register a listener to SpringApplication using ApplicationPidFileWriter as shown below :

SpringApplication application = new SpringApplication(Application.class);
application.addListeners(new ApplicationPidFileWriter("./bin/app.pid"));
application.run();

Then write a bash script to run the spring boot application . Reference.

Now you can use the script to start,stop or restart.


All of the answers seem to be missing the fact that you may need to complete some portion of work in coordinated fashion during graceful shutdown (for example, in an enterprise application).

@PreDestroy allows you to execute shutdown code in the individual beans. Something more sophisticated would look like this:

@Component
public class ApplicationShutdown implements ApplicationListener<ContextClosedEvent> {
     @Autowired ... //various components and services

     @Override
     public void onApplicationEvent(ContextClosedEvent event) {
         service1.changeHeartBeatMessage(); // allows loadbalancers & clusters to prepare for the impending shutdown
         service2.deregisterQueueListeners();
         service3.finishProcessingTasksAtHand();
         service2.reportFailedTasks();
         service4.gracefullyShutdownNativeSystemProcessesThatMayHaveBeenLaunched(); 
         service1.eventLogGracefulShutdownComplete();
     }
}