Spring Boot Dependency Management using Staters

Build Systems

It is strongly recommended that you choose a build system that supports dependency management and that can consume artifacts published to the “Maven Central” repository. We would recommend that you choose Maven or Gradle. It is possible to get Spring Boot to work with other build systems (Ant, for example), but they are not particularly well supported.

Dependency Management

Each release of Spring Boot provides a curated list of dependencies that it supports. In practice, you do not need to provide a version for any of these dependencies in your build configuration, as Spring Boot manages that for you. When you upgrade Spring Boot itself, these dependencies are upgraded as well in a consistent way.

[Note] You can still specify a version and override Spring Boot’s recommendations if you need to do so.

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Dependency management is a critical aspects of any complex project. And doing this manually is less than ideal; the more time you spent on it the less time you have on the other important aspects of the project.

Spring Boot starters were built to address exactly this problem. Starter POMs are a set of convenient dependency descriptors that you can include in your application. You get a one-stop-shop for all the Spring and related technology that you need, without having to hunt through sample code and copy paste loads of dependency descriptors.

For example, if you want to get started using Spring and JPA for database access just include the spring-boot-starter-data-jpa dependency in your project, and you are good to go.

All official starters follow a similar naming pattern; spring-boot-starter-*, where * is a particular type of application. This naming structure is intended to help when you need to find a starter. The Maven integration in many IDEs lets you search dependencies by name. For example, with the appropriate Eclipse or STS plugin installed, you can press ctrl-space in the POM editor and type “spring-boot-starter” for a complete list.

As explained in the “Creating Your Own Starter” section, third party starters should not start with spring-boot, as it is reserved for official Spring Boot artifacts. Rather, a third-party starter typically starts with the name of the project. For example, a third-party starter project called thirdpartyproject would typically be named thirdpartyproject-spring-boot-starter.

Listing some of application starters are provided by Spring Boot under the org.springframework.boot group:

Name	Description	POM
spring-boot-starter-web	Starter for building web, including RESTful, applications using Spring MVC. Uses Tomcat as the default embedded container	POM
spring-boot-starter-web-services	Starter for using Spring Web Services	POM
spring-boot-starter-quartz	Starter for using the Quartz scheduler	POM
spring-boot-starter-security	Starter for using Spring Security	POM
spring-boot-starter-jersey	Starter for building RESTful web applications using JAX-RS and Jersey. An alternative to spring-boot-starter-web	POM
spring-boot-starter-data-jpa	Starter for using Spring Data JPA with Hibernate	POM

Spring Boot technical starters

Name	Description	POM
spring-boot-starter-jetty	Starter for using Jetty as the embedded servlet container. An alternative to spring-boot-starter-tomcat	Pom
spring-boot-starter-log4j2	Starter for using Log4j2 for logging. An alternative to spring-boot-starter-logging	Pom
spring-boot-starter-logging	Starter for logging using Logback. Default logging starter	Pom
spring-boot-starter-tomcat	Starter for using Tomcat as the embedded servlet container. Default servlet container starter used by spring-boot-starter-web	Pom

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The Web Starter ^baeldung.com

First, let’s look at developing the REST service; we can use libraries like Spring MVC, Tomcat and Jackson – a lot of dependencies for a single application.

Spring Boot starters can help to reduce the number of manually added dependencies just by adding one dependency. So instead of manually specifying the dependencies just add one starter as in the following example: