How to Include Feign

To include Feign in your project use the starter with group org.springframework.cloud and artifact id spring-cloud-starter-openfeign. See the Spring Cloud Project page for details on setting up your build system with the current Spring Cloud Release Train.

Example spring boot app

@SpringBootApplication
@EnableFeignClients
public class Application {

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

}
StoreClient.java
@FeignClient("stores")
public interface StoreClient {
    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET, value = "/stores")
    List<Store> getStores();

    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.POST, value = "/stores/{storeId}", consumes = "application/json")
    Store update(@PathVariable("storeId") Long storeId, Store store);
}

In the @FeignClient annotation the String value ("stores" above) is an arbitrary client name, which is used to create either a Ribbon load-balancer (see below for details of Ribbon support) or Spring Cloud LoadBalancer. You can also specify a URL using the url attribute (absolute value or just a hostname). The name of the bean in the application context is the fully qualified name of the interface. To specify your own alias value you can use the qualifier value of the @FeignClient annotation.

The load-balancer client above will want to discover the physical addresses for the "stores" service. If your application is a Eureka client then it will resolve the service in the Eureka service registry. If you don’t want to use Eureka, you can simply configure a list of servers in your external configuration (see above for example).

In order to maintain backward compatibility, is used as the default load-balancer implementation. However, Spring Cloud Netflix Ribbon is now in maintenance mode, so we recommend using Spring Cloud LoadBalancer instead. To do this, set the value of spring.cloud.loadbalancer.ribbon.enabled to false.