Setting Up Swagger 2 with a Spring Boot REST API

1.Adding the Maven Dependency

As mentioned above, we will use the Springfox implementation of the Swagger specification.

To add it to our Maven project, we need a dependency in the pom.xml file.

<dependency>

<groupId>io.springfox</groupId>

<artifactId>springfox-swagger2</artifactId>

<version>2.7.0</version>

</dependency>

2.Integrating Swagger 2 into the Project

2.1.Java Configuration

The configuration of Swagger mainly centers around the Docket bean.

Swagger 2 is enabled through the @EnableSwagger2 annotation.

After the Docket bean is defined, its select() method returns an instance of ApiSelectorBuilder, which provides a way to control the endpoints exposed by Swagger.

Predicates for selection of RequestHandlers can be configured with the help of RequestHandlerSelectors and PathSelectors. Using any() for both will make documentation for your entire API available through Swagger.

This configuration is enough to integrate Swagger 2 into existing Spring Boot project. For other Spring projects, some additional tuning is required.

2.2.Configuration Without Spring Boot

Without Spring Boot, you don’t have the luxury of auto-configuration of your resource handlers. Swagger UI adds a set of resources which you must configure as part of a class that extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter, and is annotated with @EnableWebMvc.

2.3.Verification

To verify that Springfox is working, you can visit the following URL in your browser:

http://localhost:8080/spring-security-rest/api/v2/api-docs

The result is a JSON response with a large number of key-value pairs, which is not very human-readable. Fortunately, Swagger provides Swagger UI for this purpose.

3.Swagger UI

Swagger UI is a built-in solution which makes user interaction with the Swagger-generated API documentation much easier.

3.1.Enabling Springfox’s Swagger UI

To use Swagger UI, one additional Maven dependency is required:

Now you can test it in your browser by visiting http://localhost:8080/swagger-ui.html

In our case, by the way, the exact URL will be: http://localhost:8080/swagger-ui.html

The result should look something like this:

3.2.Exploring Swagger Documentation

Within Swagger’s response is a list of all controllers defined in your application. Clicking on any of them will list the valid HTTP methods (DELETE, GET, HEAD, OPTIONS, PATCH, POST, PUT).

Expanding each method provides additional useful data, such as response status, content-type, and a list of parameters. It is also possible to try each method using the UI.

Swagger’s ability to be synchronized with your code base is crucial. To demonstrate this, you can add a new controller to your application.

Now, if you refresh the Swagger documentation, you will see custom-controllerin the list of controllers. As you know, there is only one method (POST) shown in Swagger’s response.

4.Advanced Configuration

The Docket bean of your application can be configured to give you more control over the API documentation generation process.

4.1.Filtering API for Swagger’s Response

It is not always desirable to expose the documentation for your entire API. You can restrict Swagger’s response by passing parameters to the apis() and paths()methods of the Docket class.

As seen above, RequestHandlerSelectors allows using the any or none predicates, but can also be used to filter the API according to the base package, class annotation, and method annotations.

PathSelectors provides additional filtering with predicates which scan the request paths of your application. You can use any(), none(), regex(), or ant().

In the example below, we will instruct Swagger to include only controllers from a particular package, with specific paths, using the ant() predicate.

4.2.Custom Information

Swagger also provides some default values in its response which you can customize, such as “Api Documentation”, “Created by Contact Email”, “Apache 2.0”.

To change these values, you can use the apiInfo(ApiInfo apiInfo) method. The ApiInfo class that contains custom information about the API.

4.3.Custom Methods Response Messages

Swagger allows globally overriding response messages of HTTP methodsthrough Docket’s globalResponseMessage() method. First, you must instruct Swagger not to use default response messages.

Suppose you wish to override 500 and 403 response messages for all GETmethods. To achieve this, some code must be added to the Docket’s initialization block (original code is excluded for clarity):

5.Conclusion

In this tutorial, we set up Swagger 2 to generate documentation for a Spring REST API. We also have explored ways to visualize and customize Swagger’s output.

The full implementation of this tutorial can be found in the Github project – this is an Eclipse based project, so it should be easy to import and run as it is.

And, if you’re a student of REST With Spring, go to Lesson 1 from Module 7 for a deep-dive into setting up Swagger with Spring and Spring Boot.

6.The original address

http://www.baeldung.com/swagger-2-documentation-for-spring-rest-api

7.Source code download address

https://gitee.com/micai/micai-springmvc-swagger