SpringBoot IllegalStateException on bean using constructor injection and setter-based @ConfigurationProperties

The code below fails at startup with spring boot 3.1.1 (and works prefectly well in 3.1.0 or 2.7.12):

Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Cannot bind @ConfigurationProperties for bean 'application.ApplicationConfiguration'. Ensure that @ConstructorBinding has not been applied to regular bean

@SpringBootApplication
public class Application {

    @RequiredArgsConstructor
    @Configuration
    @ConfigurationProperties("application")
    public static class ApplicationConfiguration {
        private final ApplicationContext ctx;
        @Getter
        @Setter
        private String setting;
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
    }

}

Comment From: wilkinsona

Thanks for the report. 3.0.8 is also affected. The problem does not occur with 3.0.7.

I am surprised this works in any 3.x release due to the changes made to constructor binding detection. You're injecting a "bean" into your @ConfigurationProperties class so you need to use @Autowired to indicate that dependency injection should be used rather than property binding. With Lombok, I think that would be something like @RequiredArgsConstructor(onConstructor=@__(@Autowired))

As a slight aside, we don't recommend mixing @ConfigurationProperties and @Configuration. The former is for accessing your application's configuration properties while the latter is for defining @Bean methods. We recommend keeping the two classes separate and injecting @ConfigurationProperties classes into @Configuration classes as needed.