Threw together a quick example of this:
https://github.com/cfieber/boot-bugs
A vanilla @EnableAutoConfiguation app with groovy in the classpath fails because GroovyTemplateAutoConfiguration activates which fails because there is no templates classpath resource:
https://github.com/cfieber/boot-bugs/blob/master/src/main/groovy/bootbugs/MainBroken.groovy
workaround is to exclude GroovyTemplateAutoConfiguration:
https://github.com/cfieber/boot-bugs/blob/master/src/main/groovy/bootbugs/Main.groovy