Spring Boot Journal Application

A backend journal application built using Spring Boot, focused on clean architecture, modern Spring practices, and real-world backend features.

This project allows users to create and manage journal entries, supports authentication and authorization, integrates caching and messaging, and is structured to be production-ready.

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🎯 Project Objective

This project was built to practice and demonstrate real-world backend development concepts such as authentication, authorization, asynchronous processing, caching, and clean architecture using Spring Boot and modern backend tools.

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🚀 Features

• User authentication & authorization (Spring Security + JWT)
• CRUD operations for journal entries
• Role-based access control (Admin / User)
• Swagger / OpenAPI documentation
• Redis caching for performance optimization
• Kafka-based asynchronous processing for background tasks
• Email notifications
• External API integration (Weather API)
• Multiple environment support (dev / test / prod)

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📖 API Documentation (Swagger)

The application provides interactive API documentation using Swagger (OpenAPI).

Swagger UI (Local)

http://localhost:8080/swagger-ui/index.html

Authentication in Swagger

• Authenticate using JWT
• Add the token using the Authorize button:
• Authorization: Bearer <JWT_TOKEN>

Swagger allows testing both public and secured endpoints directly from the browser

🛠 Tech Stack

• Java 17+
• Spring Boot (3.x)
• Spring Security
• Spring Data MongoDB
• Redis
• Apache Kafka
• Maven
• JWT
• Docker (optional)
• Render (deployment-ready)

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🏗 Architecture Overview

• Layered architecture (Controller, Service, Repository)
• DTO-based request/response handling
• Stateless authentication using JWT
• Asynchronous event processing using Kafka
• Centralized configuration management

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⚙️ Configuration

The application supports multiple environments:

• application-dev.yml
• application-test.yml
• application-prod.yml

Sensitive configuration (credentials, API keys) should be provided using environment variables.

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🔐 Environment Variables

Set the following environment variables or create a .env file:

MONGODB_URI=
JWT_SECRET=
REDIS_URL=
EMAIL_USERNAME=
EMAIL_PASSWORD=
WEATHER_API_KEY=
SENDGRID_API_KEY=

• Email delivery is handled via SendGrid. A valid SENDGRID_API_KEY is required for email notifications to work.

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▶️ Running the Application Locally

./mvnw spring-boot:run

Then access:

• API Base URL: http://localhost:8080

• Swagger UI: http://localhost:8080/swagger-ui/index.html

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🚀 Live Deployment

The application is deployed on Render and running in production mode.

🔗 Base URL:
https://spring-boot-journal-app.onrender.com

⚠️ Note: This is a backend-only API. Accessing / directly may return a 404 response. Please use the documented API endpoints via Postman or a frontend client.

Active Environment

• SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=prod

Deployed Using

• Docker
• Render Web Service
• MongoDB Atlas
• Redis Cloud
• SendGrid (Email service)

Health Check

You can verify the service is running via:

GET /public/health-check

Response: ok