How to Version REST API in Spring Boot with Swagger
Many of the most popular services like Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, or PayPal are versioning their REST APIs. The advantages and disadvantages of that approach are obvious. On the one hand, you don’t have to worry about making changes in your API even if many external clients and applications consume it. But on the other hand, you have to maintain different versions of API implementation in your code, which sometimes may be troublesome.
In this article, I’m going to show you how to maintain the several versions of REST APIs in your application in the most comfortable way. We will base this article on a sample application written on top of the Spring Boot framework and exposing API documentation using Swagger2 and SpringFox libraries.
Spring Boot does not provide any dedicated solutions for versioning APIs. The situation is different for the SpringFox Swagger2 library, which provides a grouping mechanism from version 2.8.0, which is perfect for generating documentation of versioned REST API.
Different Approaches to API Versioning
There are some different ways to provide API versioning in your application. The most popular of them are:
- Through a URI path — you include the version number in the URL path of the endpoint, for example…
