How to Leverage Spring Boot 3.1’s Built‑In Docker Compose Support

This article introduces the newly released Spring Boot 3.1 version, focusing on the ability to interact directly with Spring Boot applications using Docker Compose files.

Although not entirely new, the feature has significant improvements: the Spring Boot Docker Compose module can automatically start and stop your containers, and you no longer need to copy properties between Docker Compose files and application.properties.

In this blog post, I will demonstrate how to get started with this exciting new feature in Spring Boot 3.1.

Quick Start

First, use Spring Initializr to set up a basic Spring Boot 3.1 project.

Maven project

Version 3.1.0

Java 17

Dependencies:

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-docker-compose</artifactId>
        <optional>true</optional>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

spring-boot-docker-compose Introduction

Core functions of spring-boot-docker-compose :

Assist managing (start, stop) Docker Compose services

Read docker-compose file and automatically configure application.yml

After Docker Compose starts, spring-boot-docker-compose automatically discovers the services defined in the compose file and configures the corresponding Spring properties, such as spring.redis.host and spring.redis.port for Redis, or spring.datasource.url, spring.datasource.username, and spring.datasource.password for MySQL. Existing settings in application.properties are overridden to ensure the application connects to the Docker Compose services.

To resolve port conflicts, you only need to expose ports in docker-compose.yml without explicit mappings; Spring Boot will use random ports and automatically detect and configure them. An example docker-compose.yml file:

version: "3"
services:
  mysql:
    image: mysql:8.0.33
    ports:
      - "3306"
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: root
      MYSQL_DATABASE: pigx

Currently Supported Types

Elasticsearch

MariaDB with JDBC and R2DBC

MongoDB

MySQL with JDBC and R2DBC

PostgreSQL with JDBC and R2DBC

RabbitMQ

Redis

Zipkin