Configuration

About

In a Spring Boot application, OpenFeign clients are auto-configured by default when using the spring-cloud-starter-openfeign dependency. However, enterprise-grade applications often need fine-grained control over aspects like:

• Connection timeouts

• Logging level

• Interceptors (headers, authentication)

• Retry mechanisms

• Custom encoders/decoders

To enable such control, Spring allows custom configuration classes, either globally or per client.

Types of Configuration

Configuration Scope	Description
Global Configuration	Applies to all Feign clients in the application
Per-Client Configuration	Applies only to a specific Feign client using @FeignClient(configuration = ...)

Global Configuration

Global configuration in OpenFeign refers to settings that apply across all Feign clients in your Spring Boot application. This is especially useful when:

• You want a standard behavior across microservices.

• You don't want to repeat configurations for each Feign client.

• You’re handling common concerns like timeouts, retries, logging, etc.

Instead of configuring each client separately, you define a default configuration block in application.yml or application.properties.

Spring Cloud OpenFeign reads the global configuration from the feign.client.config.default section. It uses this block to initialize every client, unless a specific override is defined for that client.

Example: application.yml

feign:
  client:
    config:
      default:
        connect-timeout: 5000         # in milliseconds
        read-timeout: 10000
        loggerLevel: full             # NONE, BASIC, HEADERS, FULL
        retryer:
          period: 100                 # initial retry interval
          maxPeriod: 1000             # max retry interval
          maxAttempts: 3              # max retry attempts

If we name a client (like account-service), that block overrides the default:

yamlCopyEditfeign:
  client:
    config:
      default:
        connect-timeout: 3000
        read-timeout: 7000
        loggerLevel: basic
      account-service:
        read-timeout: 15000

Available Global Settings

Property	Description
connect-timeout	Timeout for establishing connection (ms)
read-timeout	Timeout for waiting for response (ms)
loggerLevel	Log verbosity: NONE, BASIC, HEADERS, or FULL
retryer.period	Base interval between retries
retryer.maxPeriod	Maximum wait time between retries
retryer.maxAttempts	Max number of retry attempts
errorDecoder	Fully qualified class name of custom error decoder
requestInterceptors	List of fully qualified interceptor class names
decoder / encoder	Custom decoder or encoder bean class names (if overriding globally)

Per-Client Configuration

Per-client configuration in OpenFeign allows you to define custom settings for individual Feign clients, giving you fine-grained control over how each client behaves.

This is useful when certain services:

• Have different timeout requirements

• Need specific headers or interceptors

• Require unique retry policies

• Should use a different encoder, decoder, or error handler

Rather than applying a one-size-fits-all setup (like in global config), you tailor each client based on its communication pattern, SLAs, or external API behavior.

How It Works ?

OpenFeign allows us to configure each client separately in our application.yml or application.properties, using the name of the client defined in @FeignClient(name = "...").

We can also attach a Java config class using the configuration attribute of @FeignClient.

Configuration in application.yml

feign:
  client:
    config:
      account-service:
        connect-timeout: 2000
        read-timeout: 6000
        loggerLevel: full
        retryer:
          maxAttempts: 3
          period: 100
          maxPeriod: 500
      payment-service:
        connect-timeout: 4000
        read-timeout: 10000
        loggerLevel: basic

This ensures:

• account-service is faster and retries quickly.

• payment-service allows for longer response times and lower log verbosity.

Using Java Configuration Class

We can create a dedicated configuration class:

@Configuration
public class AccountClientConfig {

    @Bean
    public Logger.Level feignLoggerLevel() {
        return Logger.Level.FULL;
    }

    @Bean
    public Retryer customRetryer() {
        return new Retryer.Default(100, 1000, 3);
    }

    @Bean
    public RequestInterceptor customHeaderInterceptor() {
        return requestTemplate -> requestTemplate.header("X-Custom-Header", "AccountClient");
    }
}

And link it like this:

@FeignClient(
  name = "account-service",
  url = "http://localhost:8081",
  configuration = AccountClientConfig.class
)
public interface AccountClient {
    @GetMapping("/accounts/{id}")
    Account getAccount(@PathVariable String id);
}

Available Settings

Setting	Where to Use
connect-timeout	application.yml/properties
read-timeout	Same as above
loggerLevel	application.yml or Java config class
retryer	Java config class or YAML block
errorDecoder	Java class implementing ErrorDecoder
requestInterceptors	One or more RequestInterceptor beans
encoder / decoder	Custom classes to override default behavior