What’s New in Spring Boot 2.5.0? Key Features, Updates & Deprecations

Spring Boot 2.5.0 was released with many exciting new features.

Main Updates

Support for Java 16

Support for Gradle 7

Support for Jetty 10

Enhanced Docker image building

Updated datasource initialization mechanism

The documentation now includes a dark‑mode option.

Other Updates

management.endpoints.web.cors.allowed-origin-patterns

can control Actuator CORS HttpSessionIdListener is auto‑registered to the servlet context

Couchbase now defaults to an auto‑configured ObjectMapper Elasticsearch Sniffer auto‑configures when elasticsearch‑rest-client‑sniffer is on the classpath spring.data.cassandra.controlconnection.timeout configures Cassandra connection timeout spring.kafka.listener.only-log-record-metadata configures metadata logging on retries

Apache Phoenix JDBC URLs ( jdbc:phoenix) are auto‑detected

The Actuator discovery page ( /actuator) can be disabled via management.endpoints.web.discovery.enabled Actuator /configprops and /env endpoints can hide keys via additional-keys-to-sanitize Custom JMX Actuator endpoints can use EndpointObjectNameFactory When Spring Security is present, RSAPublicKey and RSAPrivateKey are auto‑configured

RabbitMQ ConnectionFactory can be customized with

ConnectionFactoryCustomizer

CloudPlatform

now auto‑detects Azure App Service server.tomcat.keep-alive-timeout configures Tomcat keep‑alive timeout server.tomcat.max-keep-alive-requests sets max requests per keep‑alive connection spring.webflux.session.cookie.same-site sets WebFlux SameSite cookie policy (default lax)

Apache HttpClient 5 is now the default for WebClient auto‑configuration

Dependency Versions

Spring Boot 2.5 updates many starter dependencies, including:

Spring Data 2021.0

Spring HATEOAS 1.3

Spring Integration 5.5

Spring Kafka 2.7

Spring Retry 1.3

Spring Security 5.5

Spring Session 2021.0

Third‑party libraries also receive updates, such as Kotlin 1.5, Groovy 3.0, Flyway 7.7, Liquibase 4.2, Jackson 2.12, Kafka 2.7, Cassandra Driver 4.10, Embedded Mongo 3.0, Hibernate Validator 6.2, Jersey 2.33, Mockito 3.7, MongoDB 4.2, JUnit Jupiter 5.7, and Elasticsearch 7.12.

Deprecations

Notable deprecations include moving ActuatorMediaType and ApiVersion from org.springframework.boot.actuate.endpoint.http to org.springframework.boot.actuate.endpoint, and the removal of certain jOOQ provider callbacks in favor of

org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.jooq.DefaultConfigurationCustomizer

. The EntityManagerFactoryDependsOnPostProcessor has been relocated to org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.orm.jpa.

For more details, see the official Spring Boot 2.5.0 release notes.