I spent probably an hour or so yesterday learning how to enable multiple DataSources in a Spring Boot application, and have them be configurable via the application.properties (or .yaml) file. The Spring Boot docs have a simple example and about a paragraph on how to do this, but I found it a bit lacking in details. After bit of experimentation and exercising my Google-fu, I was able to piece together what I needed to get this working.

Basically you just need to configure two DataSource beans in one of your @Configuration classes, and use the @ConfigurationProperties annotation to specify the property prefix used in the application.properties file. Using that prefix, you can assign any of the Spring supported DataSource properties (the Spring Boot docs have more info on this).

You’ll also probably want to annotate one of the beans with @Primary, as this will mark the default DataSource that will be autowired if you chose to do so.

Here’s an example of the configuration:

import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.jdbc.DataSourceBuilder;
import org.springframework.boot.context.properties.ConfigurationProperties;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Primary;

import javax.sql.DataSource;

@Configuration
public class ApplicationConfiguration {

    @Bean
    @Primary
    @ConfigurationProperties(prefix = "datasource.primary")
    public DataSource primaryDataSource() {
        return DataSourceBuilder.create().build();
    }

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

And the application.properties file:

# Primary DataSource configuration
datasource.primary.url=
datasource.primary.username=
datasource.primary.password=
# Any of the other Spring supported properties below...

# Secondary DataSource configuration
datasource.secondary.url=
datasource.secondary.username=
datasource.secondary.password=
# Any of the other Spring supported properties below...

Here’s a small example demonstrating how autowiring will work. If you want to autowire the secondary DataSource, you’ll have qualify it by name.

import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Qualifier;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Service;

import javax.sql.DataSource;

@Service
public class DataSourceService {

    private final DataSource primaryDataSource;
    private final DataSource secondaryDataSource;

    @Autowired
    public DataSourceService(final DataSource primaryDataSource,
            @Qualifier("secondaryDataSource") final DataSource secondaryDataSource) {
        this.primaryDataSource = primaryDataSource;
        this.secondaryDataSource = secondaryDataSource;
    }
}

Finally, one last gotcha that nailed me was that I wanted to ensure that Spring Boot did not enable the default DataSource auto-configuration, which resulted in it running a schema.sql file (on your classpath, usually under the src/main/resources/ path) to populate the DB schema. Unfortunately, using this configuration, you can’t just set the datasource.{primary,secondary}.initialize property to false. Instead you have to use spring.datasource.initialize=false. This makes sense in the end, but it tripped me up for a bit.

So just to reiterate, if you want to turn off the Spring Boot database initialization, set the following in your application.properties:

# Disable Spring DataSource auto-initialization
spring.datasource.initialize=false

Hopefully you all can find this helpful!