Production readiness & security guardrails for Spring Boot
prod-guard is a lightweight, offline-first guardrail that validates whether a Spring Boot application is correctly configured to run in production.
It performs a set of deterministic checks at application startup, detecting:
Before the application starts serving traffic.
prod-guard is designed to be:
prod-guard is a startup-time validation framework for Spring Boot applications.
It inspects the runtime environment and configuration to ensure that the application adheres to production-grade standards in terms of:
Checks are executed:
Modern Spring Boot applications often reach production with:
These issues are rarely detected by monitoring tools, because monitoring focuses on runtime behavior, not startup correctness.
prod-guard addresses this gap.
It answers a simple but critical question:
Is this application actually safe and ready to run in production?
prod-guard intentionally does not attempt to replace existing security or observability tools.
It is not:
prod-guard does not inspect traffic, analyze requests, or collect metrics.
It validates configuration correctness, not runtime behavior.
At startup, prod-guard performs the following steps:
Each check is:
There are no background threads, no network calls, and no agents.
prod-guard is offered in two editions.
The Free edition focuses on production hygiene and best practices.
Examples of checks include:
The Free edition is suitable for:
The Premium edition focuses on security hardening and enforcement.
It introduces checks such as:
Premium checks:
prod-guard is built around a small set of strict principles.
The same configuration always produces the same outcome.
No heuristics. No probabilistic checks.
Issues are detected before the application starts serving traffic.
Detect missing HTTPS enforcement, absent security headers, and unsafe defaults before traffic is accepted.
Run prod-guard in a pipeline and fail builds when blocking issues are detected.
Offline verification makes prod-guard suitable for restricted or air-gapped environments.
Ensure consistent production standards across many services.
prod-guard is delivered as a Spring Boot starter.
Integration requires:
No application code changes are required.
➡ Start with Getting Started to integrate prod-guard in minutes.