As explained in the Spring Boot reference documentation section about the web environment, adding both web and webflux starters will configure a Spring MVC web application.
This is behaving like that, because many existing Spring Boot web applications (using MVC) will depend on the webflux starter to use the WebClient
. Spring MVC partially support reactive return types, so this is an expected use case. The opposite isn’t really true, since a reactive application is not really likely to use Spring MVC bits.
So using both web and webflux starters is supported, but it will configure a Spring MVC application. You can always force the Spring Boot application to be reactive with:
SpringApplication.setWebApplicationType(WebApplicationType.REACTIVE)
But it’s still a good idea to clean up dependencies as it would be easy to use a blocking feature in your reactive web application.