Spring Cloud Bus links the nodes of a distributed system with a lightweight message broker. This broker can then be used to broadcast state changes (such as configuration changes) or other management instructions. A key idea is that the bus is like a distributed actuator for a Spring Boot application that is scaled out. However, it can also be used as a communication channel between apps. This project provides starters for either an AMQP broker or Kafka as the transport.

1. Quick Start

Spring Cloud Bus works by adding Spring Boot autconfiguration if it detects itself on the classpath. To enable the bus, add spring-cloud-starter-bus-amqp or spring-cloud-starter-bus-kafka to your dependency management. Spring Cloud takes care of the rest. Make sure the broker (RabbitMQ or Kafka) is available and configured. When running on localhost, you need not do anything. If you run remotely, use Spring Cloud Connectors or Spring Boot conventions to define the broker credentials, as shown in the following example for Rabbit:

application.yml
spring:
  rabbitmq:
    host: mybroker.com
    port: 5672
    username: user
    password: secret

The bus currently supports sending messages to all nodes listening or all nodes for a particular service (as defined by Eureka). The /bus/* actuator namespace has some HTTP endpoints. Currently, two are implemented. The first, /bus/env, sends key/value pairs to update each node’s Spring Environment. The second, /bus/refresh, reloads each application’s configuration, as though they had all been pinged on their /refresh endpoint.

The Spring Cloud Bus starters cover Rabbit and Kafka, because those are the two most common implementations. However, Spring Cloud Stream is quite flexible, and the binder works with spring-cloud-bus.

2. Building

2.1. Basic Compile and Test

To build the source you will need to install JDK 1.7.

Spring Cloud uses Maven for most build-related activities, and you should be able to get off the ground quite quickly by cloning the project you are interested in and typing

$ ./mvnw install
You can also install Maven (>=3.3.3) yourself and run the mvn command in place of ./mvnw in the examples below. If you do that you also might need to add -P spring if your local Maven settings do not contain repository declarations for spring pre-release artifacts.
Be aware that you might need to increase the amount of memory available to Maven by setting a MAVEN_OPTS environment variable with a value like -Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m. We try to cover this in the .mvn configuration, so if you find you have to do it to make a build succeed, please raise a ticket to get the settings added to source control.

For hints on how to build the project look in .travis.yml if there is one. There should be a "script" and maybe "install" command. Also look at the "services" section to see if any services need to be running locally (e.g. mongo or rabbit). Ignore the git-related bits that you might find in "before_install" since they’re related to setting git credentials and you already have those.

The projects that require middleware generally include a docker-compose.yml, so consider using Docker Compose to run the middeware servers in Docker containers. See the README in the scripts demo repository for specific instructions about the common cases of mongo, rabbit and redis.

If all else fails, build with the command from .travis.yml (usually ./mvnw install).

2.2. Documentation

The spring-cloud-build module has a "docs" profile, and if you switch that on it will try to build asciidoc sources from src/main/asciidoc. As part of that process it will look for a README.adoc and process it by loading all the includes, but not parsing or rendering it, just copying it to ${main.basedir} (defaults to ${basedir}, i.e. the root of the project). If there are any changes in the README it will then show up after a Maven build as a modified file in the correct place. Just commit it and push the change.

2.3. Working with the code

If you don’t have an IDE preference we would recommend that you use Spring Tools Suite or Eclipse when working with the code. We use the m2eclipse eclipse plugin for maven support. Other IDEs and tools should also work without issue as long as they use Maven 3.3.3 or better.

2.3.1. Activate the Spring Maven profile

Spring Cloud projects require the 'spring' Maven profile to be activated to resolve the spring milestone and snapshot repositories. Use your preferred IDE to set this profile to be active, or you may experience build errors.

2.3.2. Importing into eclipse with m2eclipse

We recommend the m2eclipse eclipse plugin when working with eclipse. If you don’t already have m2eclipse installed it is available from the "eclipse marketplace".

Older versions of m2e do not support Maven 3.3, so once the projects are imported into Eclipse you will also need to tell m2eclipse to use the right profile for the projects. If you see many different errors related to the POMs in the projects, check that you have an up to date installation. If you can’t upgrade m2e, add the "spring" profile to your settings.xml. Alternatively you can copy the repository settings from the "spring" profile of the parent pom into your settings.xml.

2.3.3. Importing into eclipse without m2eclipse

If you prefer not to use m2eclipse you can generate eclipse project metadata using the following command:

$ ./mvnw eclipse:eclipse

The generated eclipse projects can be imported by selecting import existing projects from the file menu.

3. Contributing

Spring Cloud is released under the non-restrictive Apache 2.0 license, and follows a very standard Github development process, using Github tracker for issues and merging pull requests into master. If you want to contribute even something trivial please do not hesitate, but follow the guidelines below.

3.1. Sign the Contributor License Agreement

Before we accept a non-trivial patch or pull request we will need you to sign the Contributor License Agreement. Signing the contributor’s agreement does not grant anyone commit rights to the main repository, but it does mean that we can accept your contributions, and you will get an author credit if we do. Active contributors might be asked to join the core team, and given the ability to merge pull requests.

3.2. Code of Conduct

This project adheres to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code. Please report unacceptable behavior to spring-code-of-conduct@pivotal.io.

3.3. Code Conventions and Housekeeping

None of these is essential for a pull request, but they will all help. They can also be added after the original pull request but before a merge.

  • Use the Spring Framework code format conventions. If you use Eclipse you can import formatter settings using the eclipse-code-formatter.xml file from the Spring Cloud Build project. If using IntelliJ, you can use the Eclipse Code Formatter Plugin to import the same file.

  • Make sure all new .java files to have a simple Javadoc class comment with at least an @author tag identifying you, and preferably at least a paragraph on what the class is for.

  • Add the ASF license header comment to all new .java files (copy from existing files in the project)

  • Add yourself as an @author to the .java files that you modify substantially (more than cosmetic changes).

  • Add some Javadocs and, if you change the namespace, some XSD doc elements.

  • A few unit tests would help a lot as well — someone has to do it.

  • If no-one else is using your branch, please rebase it against the current master (or other target branch in the main project).

  • When writing a commit message please follow these conventions, if you are fixing an existing issue please add Fixes gh-XXXX at the end of the commit message (where XXXX is the issue number).

3.4. Checkstyle

Spring Cloud Build comes with a set of checkstyle rules. You can find them in the spring-cloud-build-tools module. The most notable files under the module are:

spring-cloud-build-tools/
└── src
    ├── checkstyle
    │   └── checkstyle-suppressions.xml (3)
    └── main
        └── resources
            ├── checkstyle-header.txt (2)
            └── checkstyle.xml (1)
1 Default Checkstyle rules
2 File header setup
3 Default suppression rules

3.4.1. Checkstyle configuration

Checkstyle rules are disabled by default. To add checkstyle to your project just define the following properties and plugins.

pom.xml
<properties>
<maven-checkstyle-plugin.failsOnError>true</maven-checkstyle-plugin.failsOnError> (1)
        <maven-checkstyle-plugin.failsOnViolation>true
        </maven-checkstyle-plugin.failsOnViolation> (2)
        <maven-checkstyle-plugin.includeTestSourceDirectory>true
        </maven-checkstyle-plugin.includeTestSourceDirectory> (3)
</properties>

<build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin> (4)
                <groupId>io.spring.javaformat</groupId>
                <artifactId>spring-javaformat-maven-plugin</artifactId>
            </plugin>
            <plugin> (5)
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-checkstyle-plugin</artifactId>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>

    <reporting>
        <plugins>
            <plugin> (5)
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-checkstyle-plugin</artifactId>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </reporting>
</build>
1 Fails the build upon Checkstyle errors
2 Fails the build upon Checkstyle violations
3 Checkstyle analyzes also the test sources
4 Add the Spring Java Format plugin that will reformat your code to pass most of the Checkstyle formatting rules
5 Add checkstyle plugin to your build and reporting phases

If you need to suppress some rules (e.g. line length needs to be longer), then it’s enough for you to define a file under ${project.root}/src/checkstyle/checkstyle-suppressions.xml with your suppressions. Example:

projectRoot/src/checkstyle/checkstyle-suppresions.xml
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE suppressions PUBLIC
        "-//Puppy Crawl//DTD Suppressions 1.1//EN"
        "https://www.puppycrawl.com/dtds/suppressions_1_1.dtd">
<suppressions>
    <suppress files=".*ConfigServerApplication\.java" checks="HideUtilityClassConstructor"/>
    <suppress files=".*ConfigClientWatch\.java" checks="LineLengthCheck"/>
</suppressions>

It’s advisable to copy the ${spring-cloud-build.rootFolder}/.editorconfig and ${spring-cloud-build.rootFolder}/.springformat to your project. That way, some default formatting rules will be applied. You can do so by running this script:

$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spring-cloud/spring-cloud-build/master/.editorconfig -o .editorconfig
$ touch .springformat

3.5. IDE setup

3.5.1. Intellij IDEA

In order to setup Intellij you should import our coding conventions, inspection profiles and set up the checkstyle plugin. The following files can be found in the Spring Cloud Build project.

spring-cloud-build-tools/
└── src
    ├── checkstyle
    │   └── checkstyle-suppressions.xml (3)
    └── main
        └── resources
            ├── checkstyle-header.txt (2)
            ├── checkstyle.xml (1)
            └── intellij
                ├── Intellij_Project_Defaults.xml (4)
                └── Intellij_Spring_Boot_Java_Conventions.xml (5)
1 Default Checkstyle rules
2 File header setup
3 Default suppression rules
4 Project defaults for Intellij that apply most of Checkstyle rules
5 Project style conventions for Intellij that apply most of Checkstyle rules
Code style
Figure 1. Code style

Go to File → Settings → Editor → Code style. There click on the icon next to the Scheme section. There, click on the Import Scheme value and pick the Intellij IDEA code style XML option. Import the spring-cloud-build-tools/src/main/resources/intellij/Intellij_Spring_Boot_Java_Conventions.xml file.

Code style
Figure 2. Inspection profiles

Go to File → Settings → Editor → Inspections. There click on the icon next to the Profile section. There, click on the Import Profile and import the spring-cloud-build-tools/src/main/resources/intellij/Intellij_Project_Defaults.xml file.

Checkstyle

To have Intellij work with Checkstyle, you have to install the Checkstyle plugin. It’s advisable to also install the Assertions2Assertj to automatically convert the JUnit assertions

Checkstyle

Go to File → Settings → Other settings → Checkstyle. There click on the + icon in the Configuration file section. There, you’ll have to define where the checkstyle rules should be picked from. In the image above, we’ve picked the rules from the cloned Spring Cloud Build repository. However, you can point to the Spring Cloud Build’s GitHub repository (e.g. for the checkstyle.xml : raw.githubusercontent.com/spring-cloud/spring-cloud-build/master/spring-cloud-build-tools/src/main/resources/checkstyle.xml). We need to provide the following variables:

Remember to set the Scan Scope to All sources since we apply checkstyle rules for production and test sources.