How to Disable Ribbon and just use FeignClient in Spring Cloud

Question

I am aware that we can force FeignClient to use OkHttp instead of Ribbon by providing the url Ex. @FeignClient(url="serviceId", name="serviceId")

I want the OkHttpClient to be used even when just the name is provided. Ex. @FeignClient(name="serviceId")

As per the spring cloud documentation "if Ribbon is enabled it is a LoadBalancerFeignClient, otherwise the default feign client is used."

How can I disable ribbon so that the default feign client will be used.

Answer 1

None of the solutions on the internet worked for me.

1. Simply setting an absolute url in the url portion resulted in loadbalancing exceptions

// this resulted in java.lang.RuntimeException: com.netflix.client.ClientException: Load balancer does not have available server for client: localhost

@Lazy
@Configuration
@Import(FeignClientsConfiguration.class)
public class MyConfig {

    @LocalServerPort
    private int port;

    @Bean
    public MyClient myClient(final Decoder decoder, final Encoder encoder, final Client client) {
        return Feign.builder().client(client)
            .encoder(encoder)
            .decoder(decoder)
            .target(MyClient.class, "http://localhost:" + localServerPort);
    }
}

2. setting spring.cloud.loadbalancing.ribbon.enabled=false resulted in application context problems. Additional settings needs to be disabled for this to work. I did not probe further

org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'eurekaLoadBalancerClientConfiguration': Invocation of init method failed; nested exception is java.lang.NullPointerException

    at org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.InitDestroyAnnotationBeanPostProcessor.postProcessBeforeInitialization(InitDestroyAnnotationBeanPostProcessor.java:160)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.applyBeanPostProcessorsBeforeInitialization(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:416)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.initializeBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:1788)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.doCreateBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:595)
...
...

---

My working solution

Finally, after inspecting the source code in org.springframework.cloud.openfeign.ribbon.DefaultFeignLoadBalancedConfiguration, I came up with this solution

@Lazy // required for @LocalServerPort to work in a @Configuration/@TestConfiguration
@TestConfiguration
@Import(FeignClientsConfiguration.class)
public class MyConfig {

    @LocalServerPort
    private int port;

    @Bean
    public MyClient myClient(Decoder decoder, Encoder encoder, Client client, Contract contract) {
        return Feign.builder().client(client)
            .encoder(encoder)
            .decoder(decoder)
            .contract(contract)
            .target(MyClient.class, "http://localhost:" + localServerPort);
    }

    // provide a default `FeignClient` so that Spring will not automatically create their LoadBalancingFeignClient
    @Bean
    public Client feignClient(SpringClientFactory clientFactory) {
        return new Client.Default(null, null);
    }
}