Narayana Spring Boot

Narayana is a popular open source JTA transaction manager implementation supported by Red Hat. You can use the narayana-spring-boot-starter starter to add the appropriate Narayana dependencies to your project. Spring Boot automatically configures Narayana and post-processes your beans to ensure that startup and shutdown ordering is correct.

<dependency>
    <groupId>dev.snowdrop</groupId>
    <artifactId>narayana-spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
    <version>RELEASE</version>
</dependency>

By default, Narayana transaction logs are written to a transaction-logs directory in your application home directory (the directory in which your application jar file resides). You can customize the location of this directory by setting a narayana.log-dir property in your application.properties file. Properties starting with narayana can also be used to customize the Narayana configuration. See the NarayanaProperties Javadoc for complete details.

Only a limited number of Narayana configuration options are exposed via application.properties. For a more complex configuration you can provide a jbossts-properties.xml file. To get more details, please, consult Narayana project documentation.

To ensure that multiple transaction managers can safely coordinate the same resource managers, each Narayana instance must be configured with a unique ID. By default, this ID is set to 1. To ensure uniqueness in production, you should configure the narayana.node-identifier property with a different value for each instance of your application. This value must not exceed a length of 28 bytes. To ensure that the value is shortened to a valid length by hashing with SHA-224 and encoding with base64, configure narayana.shorten-node-identifier-if-necessary property to true. Be aware, this may result in duplicate strings which break the uniqueness that is mandatory for safe transaction usage!

Batch application

If you are running your Spring Boot application as a batch program, you'll have to explicitly call exit (SIGTERM) on your application to proper shutdown. This is needed because of Narayana is running periodic recovery in a non-daemon background thread.

This could be achieved with the following code example:

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

Using databases

By default, Narayana Transactional driver is used to enlist a relational database to a JTA transaction which provides a basic javax.transaction.xa.XAResource enlistment and recovery as well as a simple pooling mechanism which is disabled as default. See TransactionalDriverProperties for more details.

Be aware that Narayana Transactional driver automatically set transaction isolation level to java.sql.Connection.TRANSACTION_SERIALIZABLE, which might change default behaviour of the used database system! For example, Oracle Database

Add pooling

If you need a more sophisticated connection management, we advise you to use agroal-spring-boot-starter which provides connection pooling and many other features. To enable Agroal add the following dependency to your application configuration:

<dependency>
    <groupId>io.agroal</groupId>
    <artifactId>agroal-spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
    <version>2.x.x</version>
</dependency>

All Agroal configuration properties described in its documentation

Examples

For common database management systems, there are unit tests implemented with testcontainers to demonstrate the usage and the basic default configuration of narayana-spring-boot-starter in two use cases with single java.sql.Connection (<xxx>GenericRecoveryIT) and pooled java.sql.Connection (<xxx>PooledRecoveryIT) managed java.sql.DataSource.

Have a look at the following test cases for details.

Using messaging brokers

This Narayana starter supports two ways to enlist a messaging broker to a JTA transaction: plain connection factory and MessagingHub pooled connection factory.

By default, Narayana Connection Proxy around the JMS connection factory is used which provides a basic XAResource enlistment and recovery.

Add pooling

If you need a more sophisticated connection management, you can enable MessagingHub support which provides connection pooling and many other features. To enable MessagingHub add the following dependency and property to you application configuration:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.messaginghub</groupId>
    <artifactId>pooled-jms</artifactId>
</dependency>

narayana.messaginghub.enabled=true

All MessagingHub configuration properties described in its documentation are mapped with a prefix narayana.messaginghub. So for example if you'd like to set a max connections pool size to 10, you could do that by adding this entry to your application configuration:

narayana.messaginghub.maxConnections=10

Release & Versioning Process

This repository uses a two-step automated process for releasing artifacts to Maven Central and updating the project version.

Step 1: Create a GitHub Release

To start the release process:

1. Go to the Releases section in GitHub.
2. Click "Draft a new release".
3. In the Tag version field, enter the release version (e.g., v1.2.3).
4. Fill in the Release title and description if needed.
5. Click "Publish release".

This will trigger the Publish package to the Maven Central Repository GitHub Action.

What happens next?

1. The Publish package to the Maven Central Repository workflow:
   • Publishes the current version to Maven Central (via mvn deploy).
   • Then calls a reusable workflow (bump-version.yml) that:
     • Calculates the next -SNAPSHOT version (e.g., 1.2.4-SNAPSHOT).
     • Creates a new branch.
     • Updates the pom.xml.
     • Opens a Pull Request with the version bump.

Final Step: Merge the PR

Once the Pull Request is created, manual action should be perform to:

1. Review the changes.
2. If everything looks good, merge the PR.
3. Your main branch will now be at the next -SNAPSHOT version, ready for development.

Notes

• The tag created in the GitHub release must match the version being released.
• The PR will be automatically created only if the pom.xml version changes.
• If no changes are detected, the workflow will silently skip the bump.