Unable to get spring boot to automatically create database schema

Did you try running it with:

spring.jpa.generate-ddl=true

and then

spring.jpa.hibernate.ddl-auto = create

By default the DDL execution (or validation) is deferred until the ApplicationContext has started. There is also a spring.jpa.generate-ddl flag, but it is not used if Hibernate autoconfig is active because the ddl-auto settings are more fine-grained.

see spring-boot-features

There are several possible causes:

1. Your entity classes are in the same or in a sub-package relative one where you have you class with @EnableAutoConfiguration. If not then your spring app does not see them and hence will not create anything in db

2. Check your config, it seems that you are using some hibernate specific options, try to replace them with:

   spring.jpa.database-platform=org.hibernate.dialect.MySQL5InnoDBDialect
   spring.jpa.hibernate.ddl-auto=update
   spring.datasource.driverClassName=com.mysql.cj.jdbc.Driver
   spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/test
   spring.datasource.username=test
   spring.datasource.password=
   

**note that the manual loading of the driver class is unnecessary because it's automatically registered, so don't bother yourself with it

3. Your application.properties must be in src/main/resources folder.

If you did not specify dialect correctly it might try to default to bundled together with boot in-memory database and (as it was with me) I could see that it tries to connect to local HSQL (see console output) instance and fail at updating the schema.

@SpringBootApplication
@EnableConfigurationProperties
@EntityScan(basePackages = {"com.project.ppaa.model"})  // scan JPA entities
public class Application {

  private static ConfigurableApplicationContext applicationContext;

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    Application.applicationContext = SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
  }
}

it should work automatically but if it does not, you can enter the base package

@EntityScan(basePackages = {"com.project.ppaa.model"})  // scan JPA entities manually

Using the following two settings does work.

spring.jpa.generate-ddl=true
spring.jpa.hibernate.ddl-auto=create