[java] How do I configure HikariCP in my Spring Boot app in my application.properties files?

I'm trying to set up HikariCP in my Spring Boot (1.2.0.M1) app so I can test using it in place of Tomcat DBCP. I'd like to configure the connection pool in my application.properties file like I was doing with Tomcat, but I can't figure out how I should be doing it. All examples I've found show either JavaConfig style, or using a separate HikariCP properties file. Can someone help me figure out the property names to configure it in application.properties? I'd like to also switch from using the driverClassName approach to the DataSourceClassName approach since it looks cleaner and is recommended. Is this also possible in my application.properties file(s)?

Here's what I had for Tomcat DBCP (just some basic config, not fully flushed out)

spring.datasource.validation-query=SELECT 1
spring.datasource.max-active=10
spring.datasource.max-idle=8
spring.datasource.min-idle=8
spring.datasource.initial-size=5
spring.datasource.test-on-borrow=true
spring.datasource.test-on-return=true

And I'm currently using driverClassName and jdbc url to set up the connection:

spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/myDb
spring.datasource.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver

Now with HikcariCp as default connection pooling with new version of spring boot.It can be directly done as shown below.

@Configuration
public class PurchaseOrderDbConfig {
    
    @Bean
    @ConfigurationProperties(prefix = "com.sysco.purchaseorder.datasoure")
    public DataSource dataSource() {
        return DataSourceBuilder.create().build();
    }

}

application.yml

com:
  sysco:
    purchaseorder:
      datasoure:
        driverClassName: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
        jdbcUrl: jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/purchaseorder
        username: root
        password: root123
        idleTimeout: 600000

If you will print the value of idle timeout value

ApplicationContext context=SpringApplication.run(ApiBluePrint.class, args);
   HikariDataSource dataSource=(HikariDataSource) context.getBean(DataSource.class);
   System.out.println(dataSource.getIdleTimeout());

you will get value as 600000 where as default value is 300000 if you dont define any custom value

you can't use dataSourceClassName approach in application.properties configurations as said by @Andy Wilkinson. if you want to have dataSourceClassName anyway you can use Java Config as:

@Configuration
@ComponentScan
class DataSourceConfig {

 @Value("${spring.datasource.username}")
private String user;

@Value("${spring.datasource.password}")
private String password;

@Value("${spring.datasource.url}")
private String dataSourceUrl;

@Value("${spring.datasource.dataSourceClassName}")
private String dataSourceClassName;

@Value("${spring.datasource.poolName}")
private String poolName;

@Value("${spring.datasource.connectionTimeout}")
private int connectionTimeout;

@Value("${spring.datasource.maxLifetime}")
private int maxLifetime;

@Value("${spring.datasource.maximumPoolSize}")
private int maximumPoolSize;

@Value("${spring.datasource.minimumIdle}")
private int minimumIdle;

@Value("${spring.datasource.idleTimeout}")
private int idleTimeout;

@Bean
public DataSource primaryDataSource() {
    Properties dsProps = new Properties();
    dsProps.put("url", dataSourceUrl);
    dsProps.put("user", user);
    dsProps.put("password", password);
    dsProps.put("prepStmtCacheSize",250);
    dsProps.put("prepStmtCacheSqlLimit",2048);
    dsProps.put("cachePrepStmts",Boolean.TRUE);
    dsProps.put("useServerPrepStmts",Boolean.TRUE);

    Properties configProps = new Properties();
       configProps.put("dataSourceClassName", dataSourceClassName);
       configProps.put("poolName",poolName);
       configProps.put("maximumPoolSize",maximumPoolSize);
       configProps.put("minimumIdle",minimumIdle);
       configProps.put("minimumIdle",minimumIdle);
       configProps.put("connectionTimeout", connectionTimeout);
       configProps.put("idleTimeout", idleTimeout);
       configProps.put("dataSourceProperties", dsProps);

   HikariConfig hc = new HikariConfig(configProps);
   HikariDataSource ds = new HikariDataSource(hc);
   return ds;
   }
  } 

reason you cannot use dataSourceClassName because it will throw and exception

Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: both driverClassName and dataSourceClassName are specified, one or the other should be used.

which mean spring boot infers from spring.datasource.url property the Driver and at the same time setting the dataSourceClassName creates this exception. To make it right your application.properties should look something like this for HikariCP datasource:

# hikariCP 
  spring.jpa.databasePlatform=org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect
  spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/exampledb
  spring.datasource.username=root
  spring.datasource.password=
  spring.datasource.poolName=SpringBootHikariCP
  spring.datasource.maximumPoolSize=5
  spring.datasource.minimumIdle=3
  spring.datasource.maxLifetime=2000000
  spring.datasource.connectionTimeout=30000
  spring.datasource.idleTimeout=30000
  spring.datasource.pool-prepared-statements=true
  spring.datasource.max-open-prepared-statements=250

Note: Please check if there is any tomcat-jdbc.jar or commons-dbcp.jar in your classpath added most of the times by transitive dependency. If these are present in classpath Spring Boot will configure the Datasource using default connection pool which is tomcat. HikariCP will only be used to create the Datasource if there is no other provider in classpath. there is a fallback sequence from tomcat -> to HikariCP -> to Commons DBCP.

I was facing issues and the problem was a whitespace at the end of spring.datasource.type = com.zaxxer.hikari.HikariDataSource

Here is the good news. HikariCP is the default connection pool now with Spring Boot 2.0.0.

Spring Boot 2.0.0 Release Notes

The default database pooling technology in Spring Boot 2.0 has been switched from Tomcat Pool to HikariCP. We’ve found that Hakari offers superior performance, and many of our users prefer it over Tomcat Pool.

My SetUp:
Spring Boot v1.5.10
Hikari v.3.2.x (for evaluation)

To really understand the configuration of Hikari Data Source, I recommend to disable Spring Boot's Auto-Configuration for Data Source.

Add following to application.properties:-

spring.autoconfigure.exclude=org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.jdbc.DataSourceAutoConfiguration

This will disable Spring Boot's capability to configure the DataSource on its own.

Now is the chance for you to define your own Custom Configuration to create HikariDataSource bean and populate it with the desired properties.

NOTE :::
public class HikariDataSource extends HikariConfig

You need to

1. populate HikariConfig Object using desired Hikari Properties
2. initialize HikariDataSource object with HikariConfig object passed as an argument to constructor.

I believe in defining my own Custom Configuration class ( @Configuration ) to create the data source on my own and populate it with the data source properties defined in a separate file (than traditional: application.properties)

In this manner I can define my own sessionFactory Bean using Hibernate recommended: "LocalSessionFactoryBean" class and populate it with your Hikari Data Source > and other Hiberante-JPA based properties.

Summary of Spring Boot based Hikari DataSource Properties:-

spring.datasource.hikari.allow-pool-suspension=true
spring.datasource.hikari.auto-commit=false
spring.datasource.hikari.catalog=
spring.datasource.hikari.connection-init-sql=
spring.datasource.hikari.connection-test-query=
spring.datasource.hikari.connection-timeout=100
spring.datasource.hikari.data-source-class-name=
spring.datasource.hikari.data-source-j-n-d-i=
spring.datasource.hikari.driver-class-name=
spring.datasource.hikari.idle-timeout=50
spring.datasource.hikari.initialization-fail-fast=true
spring.datasource.hikari.isolate-internal-queries=true
spring.datasource.hikari.jdbc-url=
spring.datasource.hikari.leak-detection-threshold=
spring.datasource.hikari.login-timeout=60
spring.datasource.hikari.max-lifetime=
spring.datasource.hikari.maximum-pool-size=500
spring.datasource.hikari.minimum-idle=30
spring.datasource.hikari.password=
spring.datasource.hikari.pool-name=
spring.datasource.hikari.read-only=true
spring.datasource.hikari.register-mbeans=true
spring.datasource.hikari.transaction-isolation=
spring.datasource.hikari.username=
spring.datasource.hikari.validation-timeout=

This will help anyone who wants to configure hikaricp for their application with spring auto configuration. For my project, im using spring boot 2 with hikaricp as the JDBC connection pool and mysql as the database. One thing I didn't see in other answers was the data-source-properties which can be used to set various properties that are not available at the spring.datasource.hikari.* path. This is equivalent to using the HikariConfig class. To configure the datasource and hikaricp connection pool for mysql specific properties I used the spring auto configure annotation and the following properties in the application.yml file.

Place @EnableAutoConfiguration on one of your configuration bean files.

application.yml file can look like this.

spring:
  datasource:
    url: 'jdbc:mysql://127.0.0.1:3306/DATABASE?autoReconnect=true&useSSL=false'
    username: user_name
    password: password
    hikari:
      maximum-pool-size: 20
      data-source-properties:
        cachePrepStmts: true
        prepStmtCacheSize: 250
        prepStmtCacheSqlLimit: 2048
        useServerPrepStmts: true
        useLocalSessionState: true
        rewriteBatchedStatements: true
        cacheResultSetMetadata: true
        cacheServerConfiguration: true
        elideSetAutoCommits: true
        maintainTimeStats: false

With the later spring-boot releases switching to Hikari can be done entirely in configuration. I'm using 1.5.6.RELEASE and this approach works.

build.gradle:

compile "com.zaxxer:HikariCP:2.7.3"

application YAML

spring:
  datasource:
    type: com.zaxxer.hikari.HikariDataSource
    hikari:
      idleTimeout: 60000
      minimumIdle: 2
      maximumPoolSize: 20
      connectionTimeout: 30000
      poolName: MyPoolName
      connectionTestQuery: SELECT 1

Change connectionTestQuery to suit your underlying DB. That's it, no code required.

The code below can be used for a static datasource initialization.

public class MyDataSource {
    private static final String DB_USERNAME="spring.datasource.username";
    private static final String DB_PASSWORD="spring.datasource.password";
    private static final String DB_URL ="spring.datasource.url";
    private static final String DB_DRIVER_CLASS="spring.datasource.driver-class-name";

    private static Properties properties = null;
    private static HikariDataSource dataSource;

    static {
        try {
            properties = new Properties();
            properties.load(new FileInputStream("src/main/resources/application.properties"));

            dataSource = new HikariDataSource();
            dataSource.setDriverClassName(properties.getProperty(DB_DRIVER_CLASS));

            dataSource.setJdbcUrl(properties.getProperty(DB_URL));
            dataSource.setUsername(properties.getProperty(DB_USERNAME));
            dataSource.setPassword(properties.getProperty(DB_PASSWORD));

            dataSource.setMinimumIdle(100);
            dataSource.setMaximumPoolSize(2000);
            dataSource.setAutoCommit(false);
            dataSource.setLoginTimeout(3);

        } catch (IOException | SQLException e) {
            ((Throwable) e).printStackTrace();
        }
    }

    public static DataSource getDataSource(){
        return dataSource;
    }

    public static Connection getConnection() throws SQLException{
        return getDataSource().getConnection();
    }
}

So it turns out that almost all the default settings for HikariCP work for me except the number of DB connections. I set that property in my application.properties:

spring.datasource.maximumPoolSize=20

And Andy Wilkinson is correct as far as I can tell in that you can't use the dataSourceClassName configuration approach for HikariCP with Spring Boot.

According to the documentation it is changed,

https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/boot-features-sql.html

Example :

spring:
    datasource:
        url: 'jdbc:mysql://localhost/db?useSSL=false'
        username: root
        password: pass
        driver: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
        hikari:
            minIdle: 10
            idle-timeout: 10000
            maximumPoolSize: 30

These are the following configuration changes we can do on hikari, please add/update according to your need.

autoCommit
connectionTimeout
idleTimeout
maxLifetime
connectionTestQuery
connectionInitSql
validationTimeout
maximumPoolSize
poolName
allowPoolSuspension
readOnly
transactionIsolation
leakDetectionThreshold

I'm using Spring Boot 2.0.4.RELEASE. Hikari is default connection pool and .hikari is no longer necessary.

application.properties

spring.datasource.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
spring.datasource.jdbcUrl=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/myDB...
spring.datasource.username=xxx
spring.datasource.password=xxx
spring.datasource.poolname=myPool

application.yml

spring:
    datasource:
        driverClassName: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
        jdbcUrl: jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/myDB...
        username: xxx
        password: xxx
        poolName: myPool

And configuration does not need to extend HikariConfig, and DataSourceBuilder can be used as it was before.

@Configuration
public class DataSourceConfiguration {

    @Bean(name="myDataSource")
    @ConfigurationProperties("spring.datasource")
    public DataSource myDataSource() {
        return DataSourceBuilder.create().build();
    }
}

I came across HikariCP and I was amazed by the benchmarks and I wanted to try it instead of my default choice C3P0 and to my surprise I struggled to get the configurations right probably because the configurations differ based on what combination of tech stack you are using.

I have setup Spring Boot project with JPA, Web, Security starters (Using Spring Initializer) to use PostgreSQL as a database with HikariCP as connection pooling.
I have used Gradle as build tool and I would like to share what worked for me for the following assumptions:

1. Spring Boot Starter JPA (Web & Security - optional)
2. Gradle build too
3. PostgreSQL running and setup with a database (i.e. schema, user, db)

You need the following build.gradle if you are using Gradle or equivalent pom.xml if you are using maven

buildscript {
    ext {
        springBootVersion = '1.5.8.RELEASE'
    }
    repositories {
        mavenCentral()
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-gradle-plugin:${springBootVersion}")
    }
}

apply plugin: 'java'
apply plugin: 'eclipse'
apply plugin: 'org.springframework.boot'
apply plugin: 'war'

group = 'com'
version = '1.0'
sourceCompatibility = 1.8

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}

dependencies {
    compile('org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-aop')

    // Exclude the tomcat-jdbc since it's used as default for connection pooling
    // This can also be achieved by setting the spring.datasource.type to HikariCP 
    // datasource see application.properties below
    compile('org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-data-jpa') {
        exclude group: 'org.apache.tomcat', module: 'tomcat-jdbc'
    }
    compile('org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-security')
    compile('org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web')
    runtime('org.postgresql:postgresql')
    testCompile('org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-test')
    testCompile('org.springframework.security:spring-security-test')

    // Download HikariCP but, exclude hibernate-core to avoid version conflicts
    compile('com.zaxxer:HikariCP:2.5.1') {
        exclude group: 'org.hibernate', module: 'hibernate-core'
    }

    // Need this in order to get the HikariCPConnectionProvider
    compile('org.hibernate:hibernate-hikaricp:5.2.11.Final') {
        exclude group: 'com.zaxxer', module: 'HikariCP'
        exclude group: 'org.hibernate', module: 'hibernate-core'
    }
}

There are a bunch of excludes in the above build.gradle and that's because

1. First exclude, instructs gradle that exclude the jdbc-tomcat connection pool when downloading the spring-boot-starter-data-jpa dependencies. This can be achieved by setting up the spring.datasource.type=com.zaxxer.hikari.HikariDataSource also but, I don't want an extra dependency if I don't need it
2. Second exclude, instructs gradle to exclude hibernate-core when downloading com.zaxxer dependency and that's because hibernate-core is already downloaded by Spring Boot and we don't want to end up with different versions.
3. Third exclude, instructs gradle to exclude hibernate-core when downloading hibernate-hikaricp module which is needed in order to make HikariCP use org.hibernate.hikaricp.internal.HikariCPConnectionProvider as connection provider instead of deprecated com.zaxxer.hikari.hibernate.HikariConnectionProvider

Once I figured out the build.gradle and what to keep and what to not, I was ready to copy/paste a datasource configuration into my application.properties and expected everything to work with flying colors but, not really and I stumbled upon the following issues

• Spring boot failing to find out database details (i.e. url, driver) hence, not able to setup jpa and hibernate (because I didn't name the property key values right)
• HikariCP falling back to com.zaxxer.hikari.hibernate.HikariConnectionProvider
• After instructing Spring to use new connection-provider for when auto-configuring hibernate/jpa then HikariCP failed because it was looking for some key/value in the application.properties and was complaining about dataSource, dataSourceClassName, jdbcUrl. I had to debug into HikariConfig, HikariConfigurationUtil, HikariCPConnectionProvider and found out that HikariCP could not find the properties from application.properties because it was named differently.

Anyway, this is where I had to rely on trial and error and make sure that HikariCP is able to pick the properties (i.e. data source that's db details, as well as pooling properties) as well as Sping Boot behave as expected and I ended up with the following application.properties file.

server.contextPath=/
debug=true

# Spring data source needed for Spring boot to behave
# Pre Spring Boot v2.0.0.M6 without below Spring Boot defaults to tomcat-jdbc connection pool included 
# in spring-boot-starter-jdbc and as compiled dependency under spring-boot-starter-data-jpa
spring.datasource.type=com.zaxxer.hikari.HikariDataSource
spring.datasource.url=jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/somedb
spring.datasource.username=dbuser
spring.datasource.password=dbpassword

# Hikari will use the above plus the following to setup connection pooling
spring.datasource.hikari.minimumIdle=5
spring.datasource.hikari.maximumPoolSize=20
spring.datasource.hikari.idleTimeout=30000
spring.datasource.hikari.poolName=SpringBootJPAHikariCP
spring.datasource.hikari.maxLifetime=2000000
spring.datasource.hikari.connectionTimeout=30000

# Without below HikariCP uses deprecated com.zaxxer.hikari.hibernate.HikariConnectionProvider
# Surprisingly enough below ConnectionProvider is in hibernate-hikaricp dependency and not hibernate-core
# So you need to pull that dependency but, make sure to exclude it's transitive dependencies or you will end up 
# with different versions of hibernate-core 
spring.jpa.hibernate.connection.provider_class=org.hibernate.hikaricp.internal.HikariCPConnectionProvider

# JPA specific configs
spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.show_sql=true
spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.format_sql=true
spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.use_sql=true
spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.id.new_generator_mappings=false
spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.default_schema=dbschema
spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.search.autoregister_listeners=false
spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.bytecode.use_reflection_optimizer=false

# Enable logging to verify that HikariCP is used, the second entry is specific to HikariCP
logging.level.org.hibernate.SQL=DEBUG
logging.level.com.zaxxer.hikari.HikariConfig=DEBUG
logging.level.org.hibernate.type.descriptor.sql.BasicBinder=TRACE 

As shown above the configurations are divided into categories based on following naming patterns

• spring.datasource.x (Spring auto-configure will pick these, so will HikariCP)
• spring.datasource.hikari.x (HikariCP picks these to setup the pool, make a note of the camelCase field names)
• spring.jpa.hibernate.connection.provider_class (Instructs Spring to use new HibernateConnectionProvider)
• spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.x (Used by Spring to auto-configure JPA, make a note of the field names with underscores)

It's hard to come across a tutorial or post or some resource that shows how the above properties file is used and how the properties should be named. Well, there you have it.

Throwing the above application.properties with build.gradle (or at least similar) into a Spring Boot JPA project version (1.5.8) should work like a charm and connect to your pre-configured database (i.e. in my case it's PostgreSQL that both HikariCP & Spring figure out from the spring.datasource.url on which database driver to use).

I did not see the need to create a DataSource bean and that's because Spring Boot is capable of doing everything for me just by looking into application.properties and that's neat.

The article in HikariCP's github wiki shows how to setup Spring Boot with JPA but, lacks explanation and details.

The above two file is also availble as a public gist https://gist.github.com/rhamedy/b3cb936061cc03acdfe21358b86a5bc6

You don't need redundant code for putting property values to variables. You can set properties with a properties file directly.

Put hikari.properties file in the classpath.

driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
jdbcUrl=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/myDb
connectionTestQuery=SELECT 1
maximumPoolSize=20
username=...
password=...

And make a datasource bean like this.

@Bean(destroyMethod = "close")
public DataSource dataSource() throws SQLException {
    HikariConfig config = new HikariConfig("/hikari.properties");
    HikariDataSource dataSource = new HikariDataSource(config);

    return dataSource;
}

You can use the dataSourceClassName approach, here is an example with MySQL. (Tested with spring boot 1.3 and 1.4)

First you need to exclude tomcat-jdbc from the classpath as it will be picked in favor of hikaricp.

pom.xml

    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-jdbc</artifactId>
        <exclusions>
            <exclusion>
                <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
                <artifactId>tomcat-jdbc</artifactId>
            </exclusion>
        </exclusions>
    </dependency>

application.properties

spring.datasource.dataSourceClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.jdbc2.optional.MysqlDataSource
spring.datasource.dataSourceProperties.serverName=localhost
spring.datasource.dataSourceProperties.portNumber=3311
spring.datasource.dataSourceProperties.databaseName=mydb
spring.datasource.username=root
spring.datasource.password=root

Then just add

@Bean
@ConfigurationProperties(prefix = "spring.datasource")
public DataSource dataSource() {
    return DataSourceBuilder.create().build();
}

I created a test project here: https://github.com/ydemartino/spring-boot-hikaricp

This works for my boot application in case it helps. This class tells you what properties the config object is looking for:

https://github.com/brettwooldridge/HikariCP/blob/2.3.x/hikaricp-common/src/main/java/com/zaxxer/hikari/AbstractHikariConfig.java

I think multiple datasources could be supporting by adding datasource_whatever to the property keys in the source config file. Cheers!

@Configuration
class DataSourceConfig {

   @Value('${spring.datasource.username}')
   private String user;

   @Value('${spring.datasource.password}')
   private String password;

   @Value('${spring.datasource.url}')
   private String dataSourceUrl;

   @Value('${spring.datasource.dataSourceClassName}')
   private String dataSourceClassName;

   @Value('${spring.datasource.connectionTimeout}')
   private int connectionTimeout;

   @Value('${spring.datasource.maxLifetime}')
   private int maxLifetime;

   @Bean
   public DataSource primaryDataSource() {
      Properties dsProps = [url: dataSourceUrl, user: user, password: password]
      Properties configProps = [
            connectionTestQuery: 'select 1 from dual',
            connectionTimeout: connectionTimeout,
            dataSourceClassName: dataSourceClassName,
            dataSourceProperties: dsProps,
            maxLifetime: maxLifetime
      ]

      // A default max pool size of 10 seems reasonable for now, so no need to configure for now.
      HikariConfig hc = new HikariConfig(configProps)
      HikariDataSource ds = new HikariDataSource(hc)
      ds
   }
}

You could simply make use of application.yml/application.properties only. There is no need to explicitly create any DataSource Bean

You need to exclude tomcat-jdbc as mentioned by ydemartino

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-jdbc</artifactId>
    <exclusions>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>org.apache.tomcat</groupId>
            <artifactId>tomcat-jdbc</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
    </exclusions>
</dependency>

As you won't create DataSource bean, you have to explicitly specify using Hikari through spring.datasource.type with value com.zaxxer.hikari.HikariDataSource in application.yml / application.properties

spring:
    datasource:
        hikari:
            connection-test-query: SELECT 1 FROM DUAL
            minimum-idle: 1
            maximum-pool-size: 5
            pool-name: yourPoolName
            auto-commit: false
        driver-class-name: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
        url: jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/myDb
        username: login
        password: password
        type: com.zaxxer.hikari.HikariDataSource

In your application.yml / application.properties, you could configure Hikari specific parameters such as pool size etc in spring.datasource.hikari.*