1. Service Discovery: Eureka Clients

To include Eureka Client in your project use the starter with group org.springframework.cloud and artifact id spring-cloud-starter-netflix-eureka-client. See the Spring Cloud Project page for details on setting up your build system with the current Spring Cloud Release Train.

When a client registers with Eureka, it provides meta-data about itself such as host and port, health indicator URL, home page etc. Eureka receives heartbeat messages from each instance belonging to a service. If the heartbeat fails over a configurable timetable, the instance is normally removed from the registry.

Example eureka client:

@Configuration
@ComponentScan
@EnableAutoConfiguration
@RestController
public class Application {

    @RequestMapping("/")
    public String home() {
        return "Hello world";
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        new SpringApplicationBuilder(Application.class).web(true).run(args);
    }

}

(i.e. utterly normal Spring Boot app). By having spring-cloud-starter-netflix-eureka-client on the classpath your application will automatically register with the Eureka Server. Configuration is required to locate the Eureka server. Example:

application.yml. 

eureka:
  client:
    serviceUrl:
      defaultZone: http://localhost:8761/eureka/

where "defaultZone" is a magic string fallback value that provides the service URL for any client that doesn’t express a preference (i.e. it’s a useful default).

The default application name (service ID), virtual host and non-secure port, taken from the Environment, are ${spring.application.name}, ${spring.application.name} and ${server.port} respectively.

Having spring-cloud-starter-netflix-eureka-client on the classpath makes the app into both a Eureka "instance" (i.e. it registers itself) and a "client" (i.e. it can query the registry to locate other services). The instance behaviour is driven by eureka.instance.* configuration keys, but the defaults will be fine if you ensure that your application has a spring.application.name (this is the default for the Eureka service ID, or VIP).

See EurekaInstanceConfigBean and EurekaClientConfigBean for more details of the configurable options.

To disable the Eureka Discovery Client you can set eureka.client.enabled to false.

HTTP basic authentication will be automatically added to your eureka client if one of the eureka.client.serviceUrl.defaultZone URLs has credentials embedded in it (curl style, like http://user:password@localhost:8761/eureka). For more complex needs you can create a @Bean of type DiscoveryClientOptionalArgs and inject ClientFilter instances into it, all of which will be applied to the calls from the client to the server.

	Note
	Because of a limitation in Eureka it isn’t possible to support per-server basic auth credentials, so only the first set that are found will be used.

The status page and health indicators for a Eureka instance default to "/info" and "/health" respectively, which are the default locations of useful endpoints in a Spring Boot Actuator application. You need to change these, even for an Actuator application if you use a non-default context path or servlet path (e.g. server.servletPath=/foo) or management endpoint path (e.g. management.contextPath=/admin). Example:

application.yml. 

eureka:
  instance:
    statusPageUrlPath: ${management.context-path}/info
    healthCheckUrlPath: ${management.context-path}/health

These links show up in the metadata that is consumed by clients, and used in some scenarios to decide whether to send requests to your application, so it’s helpful if they are accurate.

If your app wants to be contacted over HTTPS you can set two flags in the EurekaInstanceConfig, viz eureka.instance.[nonSecurePortEnabled,securePortEnabled]=[false,true] respectively. This will make Eureka publish instance information showing an explicit preference for secure communication. The Spring Cloud DiscoveryClient will always return a URI starting with https for a service configured this way, and the Eureka (native) instance information will have a secure health check URL.

Because of the way Eureka works internally, it will still publish a non-secure URL for status and home page unless you also override those explicitly. You can use placeholders to configure the eureka instance urls, e.g.

application.yml. 

eureka:
  instance:
    statusPageUrl: https://${eureka.hostname}/info
    healthCheckUrl: https://${eureka.hostname}/health
    homePageUrl: https://${eureka.hostname}/

(Note that ${eureka.hostname} is a native placeholder only available in later versions of Eureka. You could achieve the same thing with Spring placeholders as well, e.g. using ${eureka.instance.hostName}.)

Note

If your app is running behind a proxy, and the SSL termination is in the proxy (e.g. if you run in Cloud Foundry or other platforms as a service) then you will need to ensure that the proxy "forwarded" headers are intercepted and handled by the application. An embedded Tomcat container in a Spring Boot app does this automatically if it has explicit configuration for the 'X-Forwarded-\*` headers. A sign that you got this wrong will be that the links rendered by your app to itself will be wrong (the wrong host, port or protocol).

By default, Eureka uses the client heartbeat to determine if a client is up. Unless specified otherwise the Discovery Client will not propagate the current health check status of the application per the Spring Boot Actuator. Which means that after successful registration Eureka will always announce that the application is in 'UP' state. This behaviour can be altered by enabling Eureka health checks, which results in propagating application status to Eureka. As a consequence every other application won’t be sending traffic to application in state other then 'UP'.

application.yml. 

eureka:
  client:
    healthcheck:
      enabled: true

	Warning
	eureka.client.healthcheck.enabled=true should only be set in application.yml. Setting the value in bootstrap.yml will cause undesirable side effects like registering in eureka with an UNKNOWN status.

If you require more control over the health checks, you may consider implementing your own com.netflix.appinfo.HealthCheckHandler.

It’s worth spending a bit of time understanding how the Eureka metadata works, so you can use it in a way that makes sense in your platform. There is standard metadata for things like hostname, IP address, port numbers, status page and health check. These are published in the service registry and used by clients to contact the services in a straightforward way. Additional metadata can be added to the instance registration in the eureka.instance.metadataMap, and this will be accessible in the remote clients, but in general will not change the behaviour of the client, unless it is made aware of the meaning of the metadata. There are a couple of special cases described below where Spring Cloud already assigns meaning to the metadata map.

eureka:
  instance:
    hostname: ${vcap.application.uris[0]}
    nonSecurePort: 80

@Bean
@Profile("!default")
public EurekaInstanceConfigBean eurekaInstanceConfig(InetUtils inetUtils) {
  EurekaInstanceConfigBean b = new EurekaInstanceConfigBean(inetUtils);
  AmazonInfo info = AmazonInfo.Builder.newBuilder().autoBuild("eureka");
  b.setDataCenterInfo(info);
  return b;
}

eureka:
  instance:
    instanceId: ${spring.application.name}:${vcap.application.instance_id:${spring.application.instance_id:${random.value}}}

Once you have an app that is a discovery client you can use it to discover service instances from the Eureka Server. One way to do that is to use the native com.netflix.discovery.EurekaClient (as opposed to the Spring Cloud DiscoveryClient), e.g.

@Autowired
private EurekaClient discoveryClient;

public String serviceUrl() {
    InstanceInfo instance = discoveryClient.getNextServerFromEureka("STORES", false);
    return instance.getHomePageUrl();
}

	Tip
	Don’t use the EurekaClient in @PostConstruct method or in a @Scheduled method (or anywhere where the ApplicationContext might not be started yet). It is initialized in a SmartLifecycle (with phase=0) so the earliest you can rely on it being available is in another SmartLifecycle with higher phase.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-netflix-eureka-client</artifactId>
    <exclusions>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>com.sun.jersey</groupId>
            <artifactId>jersey-client</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>com.sun.jersey</groupId>
            <artifactId>jersey-core</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
        <exclusion>
            <groupId>com.sun.jersey.contribs</groupId>
            <artifactId>jersey-apache-client4</artifactId>
        </exclusion>
    </exclusions>
</dependency>

You don’t have to use the raw Netflix EurekaClient and usually it is more convenient to use it behind a wrapper of some sort. Spring Cloud has support for Feign (a REST client builder) and also Spring RestTemplate using the logical Eureka service identifiers (VIPs) instead of physical URLs. To configure Ribbon with a fixed list of physical servers you can simply set <client>.ribbon.listOfServers to a comma-separated list of physical addresses (or hostnames), where <client> is the ID of the client.

You can also use the org.springframework.cloud.client.discovery.DiscoveryClient which provides a simple API for discovery clients that is not specific to Netflix, e.g.

@Autowired
private DiscoveryClient discoveryClient;

public String serviceUrl() {
    List<ServiceInstance> list = discoveryClient.getInstances("STORES");
    if (list != null && list.size() > 0 ) {
        return list.get(0).getUri();
    }
    return null;
}

Being an instance also involves a periodic heartbeat to the registry (via the client’s serviceUrl) with default duration 30 seconds. A service is not available for discovery by clients until the instance, the server and the client all have the same metadata in their local cache (so it could take 3 heartbeats). You can change the period using eureka.instance.leaseRenewalIntervalInSeconds and this will speed up the process of getting clients connected to other services. In production it’s probably better to stick with the default because there are some computations internally in the server that make assumptions about the lease renewal period.

If you have deployed Eureka clients to multiple zones than you may prefer that those clients leverage services within the same zone before trying services in another zone. To do this you need to configure your Eureka clients correctly.

First, you need to make sure you have Eureka servers deployed to each zone and that they are peers of each other. See the section on zones and regions for more information.

Next you need to tell Eureka which zone your service is in. You can do this using the metadataMap property. For example if service 1 is deployed to both zone 1 and zone 2 you would need to set the following Eureka properties in service 1

Service 1 in Zone 1

eureka.instance.metadataMap.zone = zone1
eureka.client.preferSameZoneEureka = true

Service 1 in Zone 2

eureka.instance.metadataMap.zone = zone2
eureka.client.preferSameZoneEureka = true