How to Integrate EhCache into Spring Boot for Faster Data Access

In the previous article we learned how Spring Boot uses in‑process caching to speed up data access. Spring Boot automatically configures a suitable @EnableCaching CacheManager by checking providers in the following order: Generic, JCache (JSR‑107), EhCache 2.x, Hazelcast, Infinispan, Couchbase, Redis, Caffeine, Simple.

We can also force a specific provider with the spring.cache.type property or inspect the cacheManager bean during debugging. If no third‑party implementation is specified, Spring Boot falls back to a ConcurrentHashMap cache.

Using EhCache

This guide shows how to switch the in‑process cache to EhCache in a Spring Boot application.

We start from a basic example that includes three parts:

User entity definition

@Entity
@Data
@NoArgsConstructor
public class User {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue
    private Long id;
    private String name;
    private Integer age;
    public User(String name, Integer age) {
        this.name = name;
        this.age = age;
    }
}

User repository with cache annotations

@CacheConfig(cacheNames = "users")
public interface UserRepository extends JpaRepository<User, Long> {
    @Cacheable
    User findByName(String name);
}

Test case to verify CacheManager

@Slf4j
@RunWith(SpringRunner.class)
@SpringBootTest
public class Chapter51ApplicationTests {
    @Autowired
    private UserRepository userRepository;
    @Autowired
    private CacheManager cacheManager;
    @Test
    public void test() throws Exception {
        userRepository.save(new User("AAA", 10));
        User u1 = userRepository.findByName("AAA");
        System.out.println("First query: " + u1.getAge());
        User u2 = userRepository.findByName("AAA");
        System.out.println("Second query: " + u2.getAge());
    }
}

Step 1 : Add the EhCache dependency to pom.xml.

<dependency>
    <groupId>net.sf.ehcache</groupId>
    <artifactId>ehcache</artifactId>
</dependency>

When using Spring Boot’s parent pom, the version is managed automatically.

Step 2 : Create ehcache.xml under src/main/resources:

<ehcache xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="ehcache.xsd">
    <cache name="users"
           maxEntriesLocalHeap="200"
           timeToLiveSeconds="600"/>
</ehcache>

Run the test in debug mode; the CacheManager should now be an instance of org.springframework.cache.ehcache.EhCacheCacheManager. Adding a print statement confirms this:

System.out.println("CacheManager type : " + cacheManager.getClass());

Sample test output:

CacheManager type : class org.springframework.cache.ehcache.EhCacheCacheManager
... (SQL logs) ...
First query: 10
Second query: 10

The first line shows the CacheManager is now EhCacheCacheManager instead of ConcurrentHashMap.

The second query produces no SQL, indicating the result was retrieved from the cache.

Integration successful!

Code Repository

All examples are available in the chapter5-2 directory of the following repositories:

GitHub: https://github.com/dyc87112/SpringBoot-Learning/

Gitee: https://gitee.com/didispace/SpringBoot-Learning/

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