Unable to get spring boot to automatically create database schema

Question

I'm unable to get spring boot to automatically load my database schema when I start it up.

Here is my application.properties:

spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/test
spring.datasource.username=test
spring.datasource.password=
spring.datasource.driverClassName = com.mysql.jdbc.Driver

spring.jpa.database = MYSQL

spring.jpa.show-sql = true

spring.jpa.hibernate.ddl-auto = create
spring.jpa.hibernate.dialect = org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5Dialect
spring.jpa.hibernate.naming_strategy = org.hibernate.cfg.ImprovedNamingStrategy

Here is my Application.java:

@EnableAutoConfiguration
@ComponentScan
public class Application {
    public static void main(final String[] args){
        SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
    }
}

Here is a sample entity:

@Entity
@Table(name = "survey")
public class Survey implements Serializable {

    private Long _id;

    private String _name;

    private List<Question> _questions;

    /**
     * @return survey's id.
     */
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = IDENTITY)
    @Column(name = "survey_id", unique = true, nullable = false)
    public Long getId() {
        return _id;
    }

    /**
     * @return the survey name.
     */
    @Column(name = "name")
    public String getName() {
        return _name;
    }


    /**
     * @return a list of survey questions.
     */
    @OneToMany(mappedBy = "survey")
    @OrderBy("id")
    public List<Question> getQuestions() {
        return _questions;
    }

    /**
     * @param id the id to set to.
     */
    public void setId(Long id) {
        _id = id;
    }

    /**
     * @param name the name for the question.
     */
    public void setName(final String name) {
        _name = name;
    }

    /**
     * @param questions list of questions to set.
     */
    public void setQuestions(List<Question> questions) {
        _questions = questions;
    }
}

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

There are several possible causes:

1. Your entity classes are in the same or in a sub-package relative one where you have you class with @EnableAutoConfiguration. If not then your spring app does not see them and hence will not create anything in db

2. Check your config, it seems that you are using some hibernate specific options, try to replace them with:

   spring.jpa.database-platform=org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5InnoDBDialect
   spring.jpa.hibernate.ddl-auto=update
   spring.datasource.driverClassName=com.mysql.cj.jdbc.Driver
   spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/test
   spring.datasource.username=test
   spring.datasource.password=
   

**note that the manual loading of the driver class is unnecessary because it's automatically registered, so don't bother yourself with it

3. Your application.properties must be in src/main/resources folder.

If you did not specify dialect correctly it might try to default to bundled together with boot in-memory database and (as it was with me) I could see that it tries to connect to local HSQL (see console output) instance and fail at updating the schema.