How to Enable All Endpoints in Spring Boot Actuator

1. Overview

In this tutorial, we're going to learn how to enable all the endpoints in the Spring Boot Actuator. We'll start with the necessary Maven dependencies. From there, we'll look at how to control our endpoints via our properties files. We'll finish up with an overview of how to secure our endpoints.

There have been several changes between Spring Boot 1.x and Spring Boot 2.x in terms of how actuator endpoints are configured. We'll note these as they come up.

2. Setup

In order to use the actuator, we need to include the spring-boot-starter-actuator in our Maven configuration:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-actuator</artifactId>
    <version>2.4.3</version>
</dependency>

Additionally, starting with Spring Boot 2.0, we need to include the web starter if we want our endpoints exposed via HTTP:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
    <version>2.4.3</version>
</dependency>

3. Enabling and Exposing Endpoints

Starting with Spring Boot 2, we have to enable and expose our endpoints. By default, all endpoints but /shutdown are enabled and only /health and /info are exposed. All endpoints are found at /actuator even if we've configured a different root context for our application.

That means that once we've added the appropriate starters to our Maven configuration, we can access the /health and /info endpoints at http://localhost:8080/actuator/health and http://localhost:8080/actuator/info.

Let's go to http://localhost:8080/actuator and view a list of available endpoints because the actuator endpoints are HATEOS enabled. We should see /health and /info.

{"_links":{"self":{"href":"http://localhost:8080/actuator","templated":false},
"health":{"href":"http://localhost:8080/actuator/health","templated":false},
"info":{"href":"http://localhost:8080/actuator/info","templated":false}}}

3.1. Exposing All Endpoints

Now, let's expose all endpoints except /shutdown by modifying our application.properties file:

management.endpoints.web.exposure.include=*

Once we've restarted our server and accessed the /actuator endpoint again we should see the other endpoints available with the exception of /shutdown:

{"_links":{"self":{"href":"http://localhost:8080/actuator","templated":false},
"beans":{"href":"http://localhost:8080/actuator/beans","templated":false},
"caches":{"href":"http://localhost:8080/actuator/caches","templated":false},
"health":{"href":"http://localhost:8080/actuator/health","templated":false},
"info":{"href":"http://localhost:8080/actuator/info","templated":false},
"conditions":{"href":"http://localhost:8080/actuator/conditions","templated":false},
"configprops":{"href":"http://localhost:8080/actuator/configprops","templated":false},
"env":{"href":"http://localhost:8080/actuator/env","templated":false},
"loggers":{"href":"http://localhost:8080/actuator/loggers","templated":false},
"heapdump":{"href":"http://localhost:8080/actuator/heapdump","templated":false},
"threaddump":{"href":"http://localhost:8080/actuator/threaddump","templated":false},
"metrics":{"href":"http://localhost:8080/actuator/metrics","templated":false},
"scheduledtasks":{"href":"http://localhost:8080/actuator/scheduledtasks","templated":false},
"mappings":{"href":"http://localhost:8080/actuator/mappings","templated":false}}}

3.2. Exposing Specific Endpoints

Some endpoints can expose sensitive data, so let's learn how to be more find-grained about which endpoints we expose.

The management.endpoints.web.exposure.include property can also take a comma-separated list of endpoints. So, let's only expose /beans and /loggers:

management.endpoints.web.exposure.include=beans, loggers

In addition to including certain endpoints with a property, we can also exclude endpoints. Let's expose all the endpoints except /threaddump:

management.endpoints.web.exposure.include=*
management.endpoints.web.exposure.exclude=threaddump

Both the include and exclude properties take a list of endpoints. The exclude property takes precedence over include.

3.3. Enabling Specific Endpoints

Next, let's learn how we can get more fine-grained about which endpoints we have enabled.

First, we need to turn off the default that enables all the endpoints:

management.endpoints.enabled-by-default=false

Next, let's enable and expose only the /health endpoint:

management.endpoint.health.enabled=true
management.endpoints.web.exposure.include=health

With this configuration, we can access only the /health endpoint.

3.4. Enabling Shutdown

Because of its sensitive nature, the /shutdown endpoint is disabled by default.

Let's enable it now by adding a line to our application.properties file:

management.endpoint.shutdown.enabled=true

Now when we query the /actuator endpoint, we should see it listed. The /shutdown endpoint only accepts POST requests, so let's shut down our application gracefully:

curl -X POST http://localhost:8080/actuator/shutdown

4. Securing Endpoints

In a real-world application, we're most likely going to have security on our application. With that in mind, let's secure our actuator endpoints.

First, let's add security to our application by adding the security starter Maven dependency:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>
    <version>2.4.4</version>
</dependency>

For the most basic security, that's all we have to do. Just by adding the security starter, we've automatically applied basic authentication to all exposed endpoints except /info and /health.

Now, let's customize our security to restrict the /actuator endpoints to an ADMIN role.

Let's start by excluding the default security configuration:

@SpringBootApplication(exclude = { 
    SecurityAutoConfiguration.class, 
    ManagementWebSecurityAutoConfiguration.class 
})

Let's note the ManagementWebSecurityAutoConfiguration.class because this will let us apply our own security configuration to the /actuator.

Over in our configuration class, let's configure a couple of users and roles, so we have an ADMIN role to work with:

@Override
protected void configure(AuthenticationManagerBuilder auth) throws Exception {
    PasswordEncoder encoder = PasswordEncoderFactories.createDelegatingPasswordEncoder();
    auth
      .inMemoryAuthentication()
      .withUser("user")
      .password(encoder.encode("password"))
      .roles("USER")
      .and()
      .withUser("admin")
      .password(encoder.encode("admin"))
      .roles("USER", "ADMIN");
}

SpringBoot provides us with a convenient request matcher to use for our actuator endpoints.

Let's use it to lockdown our /actuator to only the ADMIN role:

http.requestMatcher(EndpointRequest.toAnyEndpoint())
  .authorizeRequests((requests) -> requests.anyRequest().hasRole("ADMIN"));

5. Conclusion

In this tutorial, we learned how Spring Boot configures the actuator by default. After that, we customized which endpoints were enabled, disabled, and exposed in our application.properties file. Because Spring Boot configures the /shutdown endpoint differently by default, we learned how to enable it separately.

After learning the basics, we then learned how to configure actuator security.

As always, the example code is available over on GitHub.