How to resolve Spring Boot @Primary annotation overriding unexpected beans

Feb 22, 2026

Problem

When I run my Spring Boot application with multiple ProductConfig beans, I get this error:

Description:

Parameter 0 of constructor in com.example.ProductService required a bean of type 'com.example.ProductConfig' that could not be found.
Action:

Consider defining a bean of type 'com.example.ProductConfig' in your configuration.

Environment

Spring Boot 3.2.0
Java 21
Maven 3.8.1

What happened?

I was working on my product service and configuration setup. Here’s my original configuration:

@Configuration
public class AppConfig {

    @Bean
    public ProductConfig productConfig() {
        return new ProductConfig("default-config");
    }
}

And here’s my service:

@Service
@Primary
public class ProductService {
    private final ProductConfig productConfig;

    public ProductService(ProductConfig productConfig) {
        this.productConfig = productConfig;
    }

    // Service methods
}

I can explain the key parts:

@Configuration marks AppConfig as a Spring configuration class
@Bean creates a ProductConfig bean in the Spring context
@Service marks ProductService as a Spring service component
@Primary was supposed to make ProductService the primary implementation

But when I started my application, I got the error about ProductConfig bean not being found. I was confused because I had defined ProductConfig as a bean in AppConfig.

How to solve it?

I tried removing the @Primary annotation from ProductService:

@Service
public class ProductService {
    private final ProductConfig productConfig;

    public ProductService(ProductConfig productConfig) {
        this.productConfig = productConfig;
    }
}

That fixed the immediate error, but then I noticed something strange. When I injected ProductConfig into other services, it wasn’t using the default configuration I expected.

So I tried adding a @Qualifier annotation to specify which bean I wanted:

@Configuration
public class AppConfig {

    @Bean
    @Qualifier("defaultProductConfig")
    public ProductConfig productConfig() {
        return new ProductConfig("default-config");
    }
}

And updated my service to use the qualifier:

@Service
public class ProductService {
    private final ProductConfig productConfig;

    public ProductService(
        @Qualifier("defaultProductConfig") ProductConfig productConfig) {
        this.productConfig = productConfig;
    }
}

Now test again:

mvn spring-boot:run

You can see that I succeeded to resolve the bean dependency issue.

The reason

I think the key reason for the error is:

@Primary annotation affects all beans of the same type, not just the one it’s attached to
When ProductService has @Primary, Spring treats it as the primary bean for ProductService type
When Spring looks for ProductConfig, it finds the ProductService bean (which is a ProductService, not ProductConfig)
This creates a confusion in the dependency injection resolution

The @Primary annotation creates a precedence system where:

@Primary beans get highest priority for autowiring
Without @Qualifier, Spring picks the first matching bean it finds
This means @Primary on ProductService was interfering with ProductConfig injection

Summary

In this post, I showed how to resolve Spring Boot bean override issues when @Primary annotation causes unexpected dependency injection. The key point is to use @Qualifier for explicit bean selection and avoid overusing @Primary annotation.

Final Words + More Resources

My intention with this article was to help others share my knowledge and experience. If you want to contact me, you can contact by email: Email me

Here are also the most important links from this article along with some further resources that will help you in this scope:

👨‍💻 Spring Bean Documentation
👨‍💻 Spring @Primary Annotation

Oh, and if you found these resources useful, don’t forget to support me by starring the repo on GitHub!