setting up Activiti BPMN Workflow Engine with Spring Boot

spring.activiti.database-schema-update: true

• Controls how Activiti handles its database tables on startup.

• Options:

  • true – Default. Creates or updates tables automatically if missing. ✅ Good for development.

  • false – Disables auto-update. Throws an error if tables are missing or version mismatch. ❌ For production.

  • create_drop – Creates tables on start and drops them on shutdown. ⚠️ Risky, only for testing.

  • drop-create – Drops existing tables and creates new ones every time app starts.

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📚 spring.activiti.db-history-used: true

• Enables Activiti's history tables.

• These store past process execution info (like who approved what and when).

• Without this, even with history-level set, no history tables are created.

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🕘 spring.activiti.history-level: full

• Defines how much history Activiti saves.

• Options:

  • none – No history (best performance).

  • activity – Saves basic activity instance data.

  • audit – Adds task info like who did what.

  • full – Saves everything, including variables and execution details. ✅ Best for debugging/auditing.

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🔍 spring.activiti.check-process-definitions: false

• Whether to automatically scan and deploy BPMN process files from resources/processes/.

• false – You must manually deploy processes (e.g., via code or REST).

• ✅ Useful when you don’t want automatic redeployments (e.g., in production).

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🚫 spring.activiti.deployment-mode: never-fail

• Controls deployment conflict handling:

  • default – May fail if process definition is already deployed.

  • single-resource – Deploys each file separately.

  • never-fail – Ignores duplicate deployments, avoids errors.

• ✅ Safer option to prevent deployment exceptions during startup.

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⏱ spring.activiti.async-executor-activate: false

• Controls whether the async executor is started.

• Async executor handles asynchronous jobs and timers in workflows.

• false – Disables it.

• ✅ Disable if you don’t use timers/events to avoid unnecessary thread usage.

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✅ Summary (recommended for dev)

Setting	Value	Meaning
database-schema-update	true	Auto-create/update tables
db-history-used	true	Enable history tables
history-level	full	Save full execution history
check-process-definitions	false	Don’t auto-load BPMN files
deployment-mode	never-fail	Avoid deployment errors on startup
async-executor-activate	false	Don’t start async job processor