With Spring Boot Actuator we get some useful endpoints in our application to check on our application when it is running. One of the endpoints is the /info endpoint. We can add information about our application if Spring Boot finds a file META-INF/build-info.properties in the classpath of our application. With the Gradle Spring Boot plugin we can generate the build-info.properties file. When we apply the Gradle Spring Boot plugin to our project we get a Gradle extension springBoot in our build file. With this extension we can configure Spring Boot for our project. To generate project information that is used by the /info endpoint we must add the method statement buildInfo() inside the springBoot extension. With this method statement the Gradle Spring Boot plugin generates a file build/main/resources/META-INF/build-info.properties..

Listing 1. build.gradle
plugins {
    id 'org.springframework.boot' version '1.4.2.RELEASE'
}
...
springBoot {
    // This statement tells the Gradle Spring Boot plugin
    // to generate a file
    // build/resources/main/META-INF/build-info.properties
    // that is picked up by Spring Boot to display
    // via /info endpoint.
    buildInfo()
}
...

Let’s run our application and send a request for /info:

$ http -b localhost:8080/info
{
    "build": {
        "artifact": "spring-boot-sample",
        "group": "mrhaki.spring",
        "name": "sample-mrhaki",
        "time": 1482139076000,
        "version": "0.3.0"
    }
}
$

To override the default properties or to add new properties we must provide a configuration closure to the buildInfo method. If we a built-in key as the name of the property it is overridden with a new value, otherwise the key is added as a new property. In the following example we add some extra properties and override the properties time and name:

Listing 2. build.gradle
...
springBoot {
    buildInfo {
        // Generate extra build info.
        additionalProperties = [
                by: System.properties['user.name'],
                operatingSystem: "${System.properties['os.name']} (${System.properties['os.version']})",
                continuousIntegration: System.getenv('CI') ? true: false,
                machine: InetAddress.localHost.hostName,
                // Override buildInfo property time
                time: buildTime(),
                // Override name property
                name: 'sample-springboot-app'
        ]
    }
}
...

We restart the application and invoke the /info endpoint to get more results for the build:

$ http -b localhost:8080/info
{
    "build": {
        "artifact": "spring-boot-sample",
        "by": "mrhaki",
        "continuousIntegration": "false",
        "group": "mrhaki.spring",
        "machine": "mrhaki-laptop-2015.local",
        "name": "sample-springboot-app",
        "operatingSystem": "Mac OS X (10.12.2)",
        "time": "2016-12-19 09:16:50+0000",
        "version": "0.3.0"
    }
}
$

Written with Spring Boot 1.4.2.RELEASE.

Original blog post

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