Spring Cloud: How to use Feign without Ribbon

Question

I would like to use Feign without client-side loadbalancer Ribbon because I don't want to run Eureka, which would need to be distributed and highly available. Instead internal ELBs with internal DNS names managed by Route53 will do just fine.

Providing plain URLs to @FeignClient always results in no loadbalancer found for .., so I tried preventing Feign from using Ribbon:

Spring Cloud Netflix comes with FeignRibbonClient, which is used if ILoadBalancer from ribbon-loadbalancer is present. However, if this dependency is excluded FeignConfiguration is broken:

Bean creation exception on FactoryBean type check: org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'apiVersionClient': Injection of autowired dependencies failed; nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Could not autowire field: feign.codec.Decoder org.springframework.cloud.netflix.feign.FeignConfiguration.decoder; nested exception is java.lang.ArrayStoreException: sun.reflect.annotation.TypeNotPresentExceptionProxy

Ideas welcome :-)

Solution 1

If you want to use a plain URL use:

@FeignClient(value = "http://example.com", loadbalance = false)

With the Brixton release train you would use:

@FeignClient(url = "http://example.com", name = "example")

Solution 2

Somewhat late, but after looking into this if you provide your own Client Bean the LoadBalancerFeignClient wont get built and used, and the Feign open tracing autoconfig will still work.

@Bean
public Client feignClient() {
    return new Client.Default(null, null);
}

Comments

[Dave Syer]

Where does the URL go then?

[spencergibb]

Updated answer, it goes in value

[demaniak]

@spencergibb loadbalance does not seem to be available in @FeignClient any more (Spring Boot 1.3.5, Brixton SR1 release). Any alternatives?

[spencergibb]

@demaniak If you don't want to loadbalance you use @FeignClient(url="http://example.com", name="example")

[demaniak]

Thanks @spencergibb. I also figured out I can disable ribbon with ribbon.eureka.enabled=false

[spencergibb]

if eureka isn't on the classpath, that would disable it as well.

[Maxi Wu]

Greenwich release don't have attribute 'loadbalance'?

[Pepria]

@spencergibb How do I disable the ribbon loadbalancer if I am building the url dynamically and passing URI object to feign client method call? I don't want to include the url attribute in the @FeignClient ? More details at stackoverflow.com/questions/61001300/…