How to create JNDI context in Spring Boot with Embedded Tomcat Container

By default, JNDI is disabled in embedded Tomcat which is causing the NoInitialContextException. You need to call Tomcat.enableNaming() to enable it. The easiest way to do that is with a TomcatEmbeddedServletContainer subclass:

@Bean
public TomcatEmbeddedServletContainerFactory tomcatFactory() {
    return new TomcatEmbeddedServletContainerFactory() {

        @Override
        protected TomcatEmbeddedServletContainer getTomcatEmbeddedServletContainer(
                Tomcat tomcat) {
            tomcat.enableNaming();
            return super.getTomcatEmbeddedServletContainer(tomcat);
        }
    };
}

If you take this approach, you can also register the DataSource in JNDI by overriding the postProcessContext method in your TomcatEmbeddedServletContainerFactory subclass.

context.getNamingResources().addResource adds the resource to the java:comp/env context so the resource’s name should be jdbc/mydatasource not java:comp/env/mydatasource.

Tomcat uses the thread context class loader to determine which JNDI context a lookup should be performed against. You’re binding the resource into the web app’s JNDI context so you need to ensure that the lookup is performed when the web app’s class loader is the thread context class loader. You should be able to achieve this by setting lookupOnStartup to false on the jndiObjectFactoryBean. You’ll also need to set expectedType to javax.sql.DataSource:

<bean class="org.springframework.jndi.JndiObjectFactoryBean">
    <property name="jndiName" value="java:comp/env/jdbc/mydatasource"/>
    <property name="expectedType" value="javax.sql.DataSource"/>
    <property name="lookupOnStartup" value="false"/>
</bean>

This will create a proxy for the DataSource with the actual JNDI lookup being performed on first use rather than during application context startup.

The approach described above is illustrated in this Spring Boot sample.