How to Shutdown the Spring IoC container gracefully in applications

[Java Tip]

When some Web Application Shut downs Spring's web-based ApplicationContext handles shutting down gracefully but for a non web application if you want the container to shutdown gracefully and call the relevant destroy callbacks on your singleton beans, you will need to register a shutdown hook with the JVM.

So for registering a shutdown hook that enables the graceful shutdown for the relevant Spring IoC container, we simply need to call the registerShutdownHook () method that is declared on the AbstractApplicationContext class.

Code:

import org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext;

public final class Test {

     public static void main(final String[] args) throws Exception {

           AbstractApplicationContext ctx= new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(
                      new String []{"test.xml"});

           ctx.registerShutdownHook();
        
           // app runs here...
           // main method exits, hook is called prior to the app shutting down...
     }
}