Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:
Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.
Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.
Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.
To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.
You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.
Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.
Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.
To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, you can get started over on the documentation page.
And, you can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.
Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.
Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.
With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.
Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.
Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.
Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.
With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.
Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.
Mocking is an essential part of unit testing, and the Mockito library makes it easy to write clean and intuitive unit tests for your Java code.
Get started with mocking and improve your application tests using our Mockito guide:
Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.
Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:
Spring 5 added support for reactive programming with the Spring WebFlux module, which has been improved upon ever since. Get started with the Reactor project basics and reactive programming in Spring Boot:
Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.
But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.
To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:
Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:
Yes, Spring Security can be complex, from the more advanced functionality within the Core to the deep OAuth support in the framework.
I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.
You can explore the course here:
All Access is finally out, with all of my Spring courses. Learn JUnit is out as well, and Learn Maven is coming fast. And, of course, quite a bit more affordable. Finally.
>> GET THE COURSE
Spring Data JPA is a great way to handle the complexity of JPA with the powerful simplicity of Spring Boot.
Get started with Spring Data JPA through the guided reference course:
End-to-end testing is a very useful method to make sure that your application works as intended. This highlights issues in the overall functionality of the software, that the unit and integration test stages may miss.
Playwright is an easy-to-use, but powerful tool that automates end-to-end testing, and supports all modern browsers and platforms.
When coupled with LambdaTest (an AI-powered cloud-based test execution platform) it can be further scaled to run the Playwright scripts in parallel across 3000+ browser and device combinations:
Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:
Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:
1. Overview
Spring Boot web applications include a pre-configured, embedded web server by default. In some situations, though, we’d like to modify the default configuration to meet custom requirements.
In this tutorial, we’ll see how to set up and use the server.max-http-request-header-size property for request headers in the application.properties file in a Spring Boot application.
2. server.max-http-request-header-size
Spring Boot supports Tomcat, Undertow, Netty, and Jetty as embedded servers. In general, we write the server configurations inside the application.properties file or application.yaml file in a Spring Boot application.
Before Spring Boot 3, we can set the default header by defining server.max-http-header-size in the properties file. However, this property behaves differently on the embedded server. When used with Tomcat, it configures both the maximum HTTP request and response header sizes. On the other hand, it configures only the maximum HTTP request header size when the embedded server is Undertwow, Netty, or Jetty.
Spring Boot 3.0 addresses these differences by deprecating server.max-http-header-size and replace with server.max-http-request-header-size. The properties now apply to request header size for the embedded server.
Furthermore, we can configure the maximum response header by implementing the WebServerFactoryCustomizer interface. Notably, this property is supported only by Tomcat and Jetty.
Most web servers have their own set of size limits for HTTP request headers. The HTTP header values are restricted by server implementations.
The actual default value for Tomcat and Jetty is 8kB, and the default value for Undertow is 1MB.
To modify the max HTTP header size, we’ll add the property to our application.properties file:
server.max-http-request-header-size=20000Likewise for the application.yaml format:
server:
max-http-request-header-size: 20000From Spring Boot 2.1, we’ll now use a DataSize parsable value:
server.max-http-request-header-size=10KB3. Request Header Is Too Large
Suppose a request is sent where the total HTTP header size is larger than the max-http-header-size value. The server rejects the request with a “400 Bad request” error. We’ll see this error in our log file in the next example.
Let’s create a controller which has a header property called token:
@RestController
@RequestMapping(value = "/request-header-test")
public class MaxHttpHeaderSizeController {
@GetMapping
public boolean testMaxHTTPHeaderSize(@RequestHeader(value = "token") String token) {
return true;
}
}Next, let’s add some properties to our application.properties file:
## Server connections configuration
server.tomcat.threads.max=200
server.connection-timeout=5s
server.max-http-request-header-size=8KB
server.tomcat.max-swallow-size=2MB
server.tomcat.max-http-post-size=2MBWhen we pass a String value that has a size greater than 8kb in the token, we’ll get the 400 error as below:
And in the log, we see the below error:
19:41:50.757 [http-nio-8080-exec-7] INFO o.a.coyote.http11.Http11Processor - Error parsing HTTP request header
Note: further occurrences of HTTP request parsing errors will be logged at DEBUG level.
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Request header is too large
...4. Solution
We can increase the value of the max-http-request-header-size property in our application.properties file as per our requirements.
In the above program, we can upgrade its value from the default 8kb to 40KB, which will resolve the problem.
server.max-http-request-header-size=40KB
Now, the server will process the request and send back a 200 response as below:
Hence, whenever the header size exceeds the default values listed by the server, we’ll see the server returns a 400-Bad Request with an error “request header is too large”. We have to override the max-http-request-header-size value in the application configuration file to match the request header length, as we see in the above example.
In general, a request header might become too large when for example, the token used is very long due to encryption.
5. Conclusion
In this tutorial, we’ve learned how to use the max-http-request-header-size property in the application configuration files of our Spring Boot application.
Then, we saw what happens when we pass a request header exceeding this size and how to increase the size of max-http-request-header-size in our application.properties.
The code backing this article is available on GitHub. Once you're logged in as a Baeldung Pro Member, start learning and coding on the project.
