Introduction
Spring Boot 4 has been released last month! Considering all the new features it has, I decided to write about these features throughout the month of December. It will be an advent of Spring Boot 4 related tips!
A few days ago, I talked about the modularization of Spring Boot. This changed several things within Spring Boot, including within Spring Batch.
Two starters in stead of one
Originally, Spring Batch had just a single Spring Boot starter called spring-boot-starter-batch.
By default, this persisted the batch state within database tables.
However, since Spring Boot 3.4 (Spring Batch 5.2), a new ResourcelessJobRepository has been introduced.
This job repository doesn’t require any database tables (or in memory database) to work.
Starting with Spring Boot 4 (Spring Batch 6), this ResourcelessJobRepository is the default implementation of JobRepository when you include spring-boot-starter-batch.
If you want to go back to the original behaviour by storing metadata inside a database table, then you should work with the new spring-boot-starter-batch-jdbc starter.
Impact on testing
If you’ve tested Spring Batch applications before, you likely came into contact with JobRepositoryTestUtils.
This testing utility lets you clear existing metadata from the Spring Batch tables, making it so you can start with a clean slate within each test without having to restart your application.
For example:
@Autowired
private JobRepositoryTestUtils jobRepositoryTestUtils;
@BeforeEach
void setUp() {
jobRepositoryTestUtils.removeJobExecutions();
}
However, this approach does not work with ResourcelessJobRepository.
This is because under the hood, JobRepositoryTestUtils calls JobRepository.deleteJobExecution(), but this method has not been implemented within ResourcelessJobRepository.
Instead, this throws an UnsupportedOperationException.
So far, the only workaround I’ve found is to completely restart the application by adding the @DirtiesContext annotation to each test.
For example:
@DirtiesContext
@Test
void testJobLaunch() {
// ...
}
In addition to what I’ve mentioned before, there are now also two testing libraries called spring-boot-starter-batch-test and spring-boot-starter-batch-jdbc-test.
Pick the one matching the starting library you chose.
Conclusion
Spring Batch now uses a resourceless job repository by default. This behavior can be overriden by using the new spring-boot-starter-batch-jdbc starter.
Also be aware that your testing approach might change if you work with ResourcelessJobRepository.
This blogpost is a part of the Advent of Spring Boot 2025 series.