spring-boot-demo/resilience/docs/08-starter-aop-renamed-to-starter-aspectj.md

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spring-boot-starter-aop was renamed, not removed

Every pre-Boot-4 AOP or Resilience4j guide tells you to add spring-boot-starter-aop when an annotation (@Retryable, @ConcurrencyLimit, Resilience4j's @CircuitBreaker, plain @Aspect beans, anything proxy-based) needs AspectJ on the classpath. On Boot 4.1, adding that dependency breaks the build before the application ever starts:

[ERROR] 'dependencies.dependency.version' for org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-aop:jar is missing.

Captured by scripts/reproduce-starter-aop-break.sh against the minimal broken-example/pom.xml, which adds only that one dependency: 00a-starter-aop-build-error.txt.

It was renamed, not dropped

It is tempting to read that error as "the starter is gone, assemble spring-aop and aspectjweaver by hand instead" -- an earlier version of the sibling post this repo also serves said exactly that. It is half right and half wrong. Maven Central's maven-metadata.xml for both artifact IDs, read together, settles it: 00b-starter-aspectj-metadata-timeline.txt.

spring-boot-starter-aop's last-ever published version is 4.0.0-M2. spring-boot-starter-aspectj's first-ever published version is 4.0.0-M3 -- the very next milestone in the same 4.0 line, and it carries straight through to the 4.0.0 GA and every 4.1.x release since. That is a rename at a specific milestone boundary, not an unrelated new artifact and not a starter dropped with nothing replacing it.

The renamed starter's own published POM confirms it bundles exactly the two jars this module's pom.xml needs: 00c-starter-aspectj-pom-dependencies.txt.

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-aspectj</artifactId>
</dependency>

is all this module adds (see pom.xml) -- one line, version-managed by the parent POM like any other starter, resolving to spring-aop + aspectjweaver underneath. Assembling those two dependencies by hand still works and behaves identically, since it's what the starter does anyway, but there's no longer a reason to: the starter has the same name shape as every other Boot starter, it's just spelled aspectj instead of aop from the 4.0 line onward.

If you're on a build that still references spring-boot-starter-aop after upgrading to Boot 4, the fix is a rename in your pom.xml, not a rewrite: swap the artifactId to spring-boot-starter-aspectj and nothing else changes.

Going deeper

• pom.xml -- this module's own dependency, with the corrected comment
• Maven Central: spring-boot-starter-aop/maven-metadata.xml and spring-boot-starter-aspectj/maven-metadata.xml -- rel="nofollow"
• Resilience4j Circuit Breaker in Spring Boot 4.1: What It's Still For -- the sibling post this same correction applies to

← What is left for Resilience4j | Migrating from spring-retry →