How to properly configure Velocity with Spring Boot?

Question

I'm new to Spring Boot, and I'm having major trouble with this. There's a short list of Velocity-related Spring Boot properties I can set in application.properties, and those are working fine. But there's a huge number of Velocity properties that I can't configure that way.

I found this question, that seems to address what I need, but it isn't working for me. When I use breakpoints within Spring Boot during program start-up, I can see the "spring.velocity.properties.*" key/value pairs being read and loaded by Spring Boot correctly--they just don't seem to affect anything. No matter what value I set them to, the Velocity run-time behavior uses the default anyway.

What am I missing?

EDIT:

pom.xml

<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
<groupId>docuvore</groupId>
<artifactId>docuvore-server</artifactId>
<version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>

<parent>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
    <version>1.3.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT</version>
</parent>

<properties>
    <java.version>1.8</java.version>
</properties>

<dependencies>

    <!-- Core Spring Boot -->
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
    </dependency>

    <!-- Tomcat and Spring Web MVC -->
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
    </dependency>

    <!-- Spring Security 
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    -->

    <!-- Spring Data and MongoDB -->
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-mongodb</artifactId>
    </dependency>

    <!-- Apache Velocity --> 
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-velocity</artifactId>
    </dependency>

    <!-- Project Lombok -->
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.projectlombok</groupId>
        <artifactId>lombok</artifactId>
        <version>1.16.2</version>
        <scope>provided</scope>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

<!-- Additional lines to be added here... -->

<!-- (you don't need this if you are using a .RELEASE version) -->
<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>spring-snapshots</id>
        <url>http://repo.spring.io/snapshot</url>
        <snapshots><enabled>true</enabled></snapshots>
    </repository>
    <repository>
        <id>spring-milestones</id>
        <url>http://repo.spring.io/milestone</url>
    </repository>
</repositories>
<pluginRepositories>
    <pluginRepository>
        <id>spring-snapshots</id>
        <url>http://repo.spring.io/snapshot</url>
    </pluginRepository>
    <pluginRepository>
        <id>spring-milestones</id>
        <url>http://repo.spring.io/milestone</url>
    </pluginRepository>
</pluginRepositories>
</project>

application.properties

logging.path=/logs
#spring.velocity.resourceLoaderPath = /templates/
#spring.velocity.checkTemplateLocation=false
spring.velocity.properties.template.provide.scope.control = true
spring.velocity.properties.directive.parse.max.depth = 9
spring.velocity.properties.runtime.log = C:/logs/velocity.log

Application.java

package com.github.docuvore.prototype;

import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.EnableAutoConfiguration;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.ComponentScan;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;

@Configuration 
@EnableAutoConfiguration
@ComponentScan
public class Application {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
    }
}

ExampleVelocityController.java

package com.github.docuvore.prototype.examples;

import java.io.StringWriter;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

import org.apache.velocity.Template;
import org.apache.velocity.VelocityContext;
import org.apache.velocity.app.VelocityEngine;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController;

@RestController
public class ExampleVelocityController {

    @RequestMapping("/exampleVelocity")
    String home() {
        String result = null;

        VelocityEngine velocity = new VelocityEngine();
        velocity.init();
        Template template = velocity.getTemplate("src/main/resources/templates/general/htmlElement.vm");

        VelocityContext context = new VelocityContext();
        context.put("title", "Apache Velocity");

        StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();
        template.merge(context, writer);

        result = writer.toString();

        return result;
    }
}

htmlElement.vm

<html>
#parse ("src/main/resources/templates/general/bodyElement.vm")
</html>

bodyElement.vm

<body>
#parse ("src/main/resources/templates/general/bodyElement.vm")
</body>

Solution

You should put your breakpoint at VelocityAutoConfiguration to ensure that Velocity is used.

Take a look at spring-boot-sample-velocity. Check the dependencies.

Comments

[wMattDodd]

Velocity is definitely being used, I can work with it just fine, and I can see the direct Spring Boot Velocity properties like spring.velocity.resourceLoaderPath or spring.velocity.checkTemplateLocation being used in the VelocityAutoConfiguration. The only thing I can't do is get Velocity configured by the spring.velocity.properties.[nativeVelocityProperty] style properties. Unfortunately that sample isn't any use, because it's not trying to do the same thing I am.

[emecas]

A commit in the 2nd link says "Deprecate support for Velocity". More details here: github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/commit/…