Prevent Spring Boot from registering a servlet filter

Question

I have a Spring Boot WebMVC application, and a bean that inherits from AbstractPreAuthenticatedProcessingFilter which I am explicitly adding to a specific spot in the Spring

Answer 1

By default Spring Boot creates a FilterRegistrationBean for every Filter in the application context for which a FilterRegistrationBean doesn't already exist. This allows you to take control of the registration process, including disabling registration, by declaring your own FilterRegistrationBean for the Filter. For your PreAuthenticationFilter the required configuration would look like this:

@Bean
public FilterRegistrationBean registration(PreAuthenticationFilter filter) {
    FilterRegistrationBean registration = new FilterRegistrationBean(filter);
    registration.setEnabled(false);
    return registration;
}

You may also be interested in this Spring Boot issue which discusses how to disable the automatic registration of Filter and Servlet beans.

Answer 2

If you want to unregister all filters at one time here's my trick:

public class DefaultFiltersBeanFactoryPostProcessor implements BeanFactoryPostProcessor {

    @Override
    public void postProcessBeanFactory(ConfigurableListableBeanFactory bf)
            throws BeansException {
        DefaultListableBeanFactory beanFactory = (DefaultListableBeanFactory) bf;

        Arrays.stream(beanFactory.getBeanNamesForType(javax.servlet.Filter.class))
                .forEach(name -> {

                    BeanDefinition definition = BeanDefinitionBuilder
                            .genericBeanDefinition(FilterRegistrationBean.class)
                            .setScope(BeanDefinition.SCOPE_SINGLETON)
                            .addConstructorArgReference(name)
                            .addConstructorArgValue(new ServletRegistrationBean[]{})
                            .addPropertyValue("enabled", false)
                            .getBeanDefinition();

                    beanFactory.registerBeanDefinition(name + "FilterRegistrationBean",
                            definition);
                });
    }
}

A bit more about this technique - here.