Avoid unwanted component scanning of Spring Configuration

Lubos KrnacDecember 1st, 2014Last Updated: December 1st, 2014

0 88 2 minutes read

I came through interesting problem on Stack Overflow. Brett Ryan had problem that Spring Security configuration was initialized twice. When I was looking into his code I spot the problem. Let me show show the code.

He has pretty standard Spring application (not using Spring Boot). Uses more modern Java servlet Configuration based on Spring’s AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer.

import org.springframework.web.servlet.support.AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer;

public class AppInitializer extends
		AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer {


    @Override
    protected Class<?>[] getRootConfigClasses() {
        return new Class[]{SecurityConfig.class};
    }

    @Override
    protected Class<?>[] getServletConfigClasses() {
        return new Class[]{WebConfig.class};
    }

    @Override
    protected String[] getServletMappings() {
        return new String[]{"/"};
    }

}

As you can see, there are two configuration classes:

SecurityConfig – holds Spring Security configuration
WebConfig – main Spring’s IoC container configuration

package net.lkrnac.blog.dontscanconfigurations;

import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.authentication.builders.AuthenticationManagerBuilder;
import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.configuration.WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter;
import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.servlet.configuration.EnableWebMvcSecurity;

@Configuration
@EnableWebMvcSecurity
public class SecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

    @Autowired
    public void configureGlobal(AuthenticationManagerBuilder auth) throws Exception {
        System.out.println("Spring Security init...");
        auth
                .inMemoryAuthentication()
                .withUser("user").password("password").roles("USER");
    }

}

import org.springframework.context.annotation.ComponentScan;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.EnableWebMvc;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.WebMvcConfigurerAdapter;

@Configuration
@EnableWebMvc
@ComponentScan(basePackages = "net.lkrnac.blog.dontscanconfigurations")
public class WebConfig extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {

}

Pay attention to the component scanning in WebConfig. It is scanning package where all three classes are located. When you run this on servlet container, text “Spring Security init…” is written to console twice. It mean mean SecurityConfig configuration is loaded twice. It was loaded:

During initialization of servlet container in method AppInitializer.getRootConfigClasses()
By component scan in class WebConfig

Why? I found this explanation in Spring’s documentation:

Remember that @Configuration classes are meta-annotated with @Component, so they are candidates for component-scanning!

So this is feature of Spring and therefore we want to avoid component scanning of Spring @Configuration used by Servlet configuration. Brett Ryan independently found this problem and showed his solution in mentioned Stack Overflow question:

@ComponentScan(basePackages = "com.acme.app",
               excludeFilters = {
                   @Filter(type = ASSIGNABLE_TYPE,
                           value = {
                               WebConfig.class,
                               SecurityConfig.class
                           })
               })

I don’t like this solution. Annotation is too verbose for me. Also some developer can create new @Configuration class and forget to include it into this filter. I would rather specify special package that would be excluded from Spring’s component scanning.