Resolving Circular Dependency Issues in SpringBoot: Causes, Exceptions, and Practical Solutions

When Spring cannot resolve a circular dependency, it throws a BeanCurrentlyInCreationException indicating that a bean is currently in creation and an unresolvable circular reference exists.

Although Spring uses a three‑level cache to handle many circular dependencies, constructor‑based injection often leads to situations where the container cannot break the cycle, resulting in the above exception.

To address the problem you can:

Redesign the architecture to eliminate circular references.

Enable circular references in SpringBoot 2.6.x by setting the property:

spring:
  main:
    allow-circular-references: true

Apply @Lazy together with @Autowired for field injection:

@Lazy
@Autowired
private MyBean myBean;

Use @Lazy on constructor parameters:

@Component
public class MyBean {
    private MyBean2 myBean2;
    @Autowired
    public MyBean(@Lazy MyBean2 myBean2) {
        this.myBean2 = myBean2;
    }
}

Inject dependencies via setter methods:

@Autowired
public void setDao(MyDao dao) {
    this.dao = dao;
}

Obtain beans directly from the ApplicationContext when needed:

@Component
public class MyContextProvider {
    @Autowired
    private ApplicationContext appContext;
    public <T> T getBean(Class<T> beanClass) {
        return appContext.getBean(beanClass);
    }
    public Object getBean(String beanName) {
        return appContext.getBean(beanName);
    }
}

If redesign is not feasible, applying one of the above techniques can help you work around the circular dependency while keeping the application stable.

In summary, avoid circular dependencies whenever possible; if they cannot be avoided, use the provided configuration options, lazy injection, setter injection, or direct context lookup to mitigate the issue.