43.2 Locating auto-configuration candidates

Spring Boot checks for the presence of a META-INF/spring.factories file within your published jar. The file should list your configuration classes under the EnableAutoConfiguration key.

org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.EnableAutoConfiguration=\
com.mycorp.libx.autoconfigure.LibXAutoConfiguration,\
com.mycorp.libx.autoconfigure.LibXWebAutoConfiguration

You can use the @AutoConfigureAfter or @AutoConfigureBefore annotations if your configuration needs to be applied in a specific order. For example, if you provide web-specific configuration, your class may need to be applied after WebMvcAutoConfiguration.

If you want to order certain auto-configurations that shouldn’t have any direct knowledge of each other, you can also use @AutoconfigureOrder. That annotation has the same semantic as the regular @Order annotation but provides a dedicated order for auto-configuration classes.

	Note
Auto-configurations have to be loaded that way only. Make sure that they are defined in a specific package space and that they are never the target of component scan in particular.