Configuring Fresh Spring Boot with spring-data-jpa

So recently, I started learning spring boot and I was doing well. Not until I needed to add a database to my spring app using spring-data-jpa.

That’s where I got stuck.

How will a freshly initialized project be throwing error.

The error for me was

APPLICATION FAILED TO START

***************************

Description:

Failed to configure a DataSource: ‘url’ attribute is not specified and no embedded datasource could be configured.

Reason: Failed to determine a suitable driver class

Action: Consider the following:

If you want an embedded database (H2, HSQL or Derby), please put it on the classpath.

If you have database settings to be loaded from a particular profile you may need to activate it (no profiles are currently active).

Process finished with exit code 0

So the error message has suggested two path to solve the problem even without Google searching the error. That’s why people love Java

The solution we will explore will follow the first route of configuring the database on the classpath in application.properties.

So after initializing the project, the first thing is to go to the application.properties file. It is located under src/main/resources

Then specify the following

spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/db_name?useUnicode=true&useJDBCCompliantTimezoneShift=true&useLegacyDatetimeCode=false&serverTimezone=UTC

spring.datasource.username=yourusername

spring.datasource.password=yourpasswordifany

spring.datasource.platform=mysql

For the datasource uri, create a database. For me, I was using mysql and the commands below worked for me

In the terminal, run

mysql -u USERNAME -p PASSWORD;

After successfully switching into the mysql, run

create database DATABASE_NAME;

Don’t forget to the include the semi-colon in the commands while running, that was a major mistake I made at a point.

Then you can “exit” and add the database name created to the datasource uri.

But after simply specifying the datasource.uri = jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/database_name

I kept getting the error below

java.sql.SQLException: The server time zone value ‘WAT’ is unrecognized or represents more than one time zone. You must configure either the server or JDBC driver (via the serverTimezone configuration property) to use a more specifc time zone value if you want to utilize time zone support.

To solve this new error, add additional parameters of

useUnicode = true

useJDBCCompliantTimezoneShift = true

useLegacyDatetimeCode = false

serverTimezone = UTC

so the final input will be

spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/db_name?useUnicode=true&useJDBCCompliantTimezoneShift=true&useLegacyDatetimeCode=false&serverTimezone=UTC

But what if I am not yet ready to define database configuration.

In the application.properties, simply specify

spring.autoconfigure.exclude=org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.jdbc.DataSourceAutoConfiguration

which you can then delete later when you’re ready to point an actual database

There are other ways to solve this error, others involve using annotation among others.

Thanks