In a previous post we saw how we can use Spring Boot in a Ratpack application. But the integration can also be the other way around: using Ratpack in a Spring Boot application. This way we can use Ratpack’s power to handle requests sent to our Spring Boot application and still use all Spring Boot features in our application. The easiest way to add Ratpack to a Spring Boot application is adding a Ratpack dependency and use the @EnableRatpack annotation. With this annotation a RatpackServer instance is created and started along with configuration options.

Let’s see an example Spring Boot application with Ratpack enabled. First we add Ratpack as dependency to our Spring Boot application. In our example we also add Ratpack’s Dropwizard module as dependency. We use Gradle in our example: