Advisor Fails to Detect Spring Boot Upgrade with BOM Isolation

Products

• VMware Tanzu Spring Essentials

Issue/Introduction

When running the advisor build-config get command on a Gradle project, the Advisor tool fails to identify the Spring Boot dependency for version upgrades.

Even though the project is effectively using Spring Boot versions via a Bill of Materials (BOM), the Advisor does not suggest Boot-specific upgrades, and the build-config.json output does not correctly map the project as a Spring Boot application.

Environment

Spring Boot 3

Cause

The issue stems from how the Advisor scanner traverses the Gradle dependency graph.

When using mavenBom inside a dependencyManagement block without an accompanying "signature" Spring Boot artifact (like spring-boot-starter or spring-boot), the Advisor sees the BOM as a versioning metadata provider rather than an active framework implementation.

Because spring-context is a core Spring Framework artifact—not unique to Spring Boot—the Advisor treats the project as a standard Spring Framework project and fails to trigger the logic required to increment the version string within the mavenBom declaration.

Resolution

Currently there is no resolution. As workaround:

Open your build.gradle file.

Add org.springframework.boot:spring-boot to your implementation dependencies.

Note: Do not specify a version number here; let it be managed by your existing BOM.

dependencies {
     // Workaround: Explicitly add spring-boot to trigger Advisor detection
     implementation 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot'
     
     implementation 'org.springframework:spring-context'
}

Once this dependency is added, advisor build-config get will detect the spring-boot artifact