Springboot 2.6.0 / Spring fox 3 - Failed to start bean 'documentationPluginsBootstrapper'

This problem's caused by a bug in Springfox. It's making an assumption about how Spring MVC is set up that doesn't always hold true. Specifically, it's assuming that MVC's path matching will use the Ant-based path matcher and not the PathPattern-based matcher. PathPattern-based matching has been an option for some time now and is the default as of Spring Boot 2.6.

As described in Spring Boot 2.6's release notes, you can restore the configuration that Springfox assumes will be used by setting spring.mvc.pathmatch.matching-strategy to ant-path-matcher in your application.properties file. Note that this will only work if you are not using Spring Boot's Actuator. The Actuator always uses PathPattern-based parsing, irrespective of the configured matching-strategy. A change to Springfox will be required if you want to use it with the Actuator in Spring Boot 2.6 and later.


Consider migration to springdoc