Spring Boot starter dependencies are a great way to simplify the dependencies section of your project’s build specification by aggregating commonly used dependencies under more coarse-grained dependencies.
Benefits of Spring Boot Starters
The first benefit of Spring Boot starter dependencies it that your build will transitively resolve the dependencies that are declared in the starter dependency. This way your dependency list will be smaller.
The other benefit is that they are typically organized by the type of functionality they bring to an application. For example, rather than specify specific libraries required for jpa (such as spring-orm, hibernate and spring data jpa) you can simply add the spring-boot-starter-data-jpa starter as a dependency.
Starters Organization
Spring Boot starters are organized as pom file and are available on Github. Here is a list of most common Spring Boot Starters used for building your applications:
List of Spring Boot Starters
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
spring-boot-starter |
Core starter, including auto-configuration support, logging and YAML |
spring-boot-starter-activemq |
Starter for JMS messaging using Apache ActiveMQ |
spring-boot-starter-amqp |
Starter for using Spring AMQP and Rabbit MQ |
spring-boot-starter-aop |
Starter for aspect-oriented programming with Spring AOP and AspectJ |
spring-boot-starter-artemis |
Starter for JMS messaging using Apache Artemis |
spring-boot-starter-batch |
Starter for using Spring Batch |
spring-boot-starter-cache |
Starter for using Spring Framework’s caching support |
spring-boot-starter-cloud-connectors |
Starter for using Spring Cloud Connectors which simplifies connecting to services in cloud platforms like Cloud Foundry and Heroku |
spring-boot-starter-data-cassandra |
Starter for using Cassandra distributed database and Spring Data Cassandra |
spring-boot-starter-data-cassandra-reactive |
Starter for using Cassandra distributed database and Spring Data Cassandra Reactive |
spring-boot-starter-data-couchbase |
Starter for using Couchbase document-oriented database and Spring Data Couchbase |
spring-boot-starter-data-couchbase-reactive |
Starter for using Couchbase document-oriented database and Spring Data Couchbase Reactive |
spring-boot-starter-data-elasticsearch |
Starter for using Elasticsearch search and analytics engine and Spring Data Elasticsearch |
spring-boot-starter-data-jdbc |
Starter for using Spring Data JDBC |
spring-boot-starter-data-jpa |
Starter for using Spring Data JPA with Hibernate |
spring-boot-starter-data-ldap |
Starter for using Spring Data LDAP |
spring-boot-starter-data-mongodb |
Starter for using MongoDB document-oriented database and Spring Data MongoDB |
spring-boot-starter-data-mongodb-reactive |
Starter for using MongoDB document-oriented database and Spring Data MongoDB Reactive |
spring-boot-starter-data-neo4j |
Starter for using Neo4j graph database and Spring Data Neo4j |
spring-boot-starter-data-redis |
Starter for using Redis key-value data store with Spring Data Redis and the Lettuce client |
spring-boot-starter-data-redis-reactive |
Starter for using Redis key-value data store with Spring Data Redis reactive and the Lettuce client |
spring-boot-starter-data-rest |
Starter for exposing Spring Data repositories over REST using Spring Data REST |
spring-boot-starter-data-solr |
Starter for using the Apache Solr search platform with Spring Data Solr |
spring-boot-starter-freemarker |
Starter for building MVC web applications using FreeMarker views |
spring-boot-starter-groovy-templates |
Starter for building MVC web applications using Groovy Templates views |
spring-boot-starter-hateoas |
Starter for building hypermedia-based RESTful web application with Spring MVC and Spring HATEOAS |
spring-boot-starter-integration |
Starter for using Spring Integration |
spring-boot-starter-jdbc |
Starter for using JDBC with the HikariCP connection pool |
spring-boot-starter-jersey |
Starter for building RESTful web applications using JAX-RS and Jersey. An alternative to spring-boot-starter-web |
spring-boot-starter-jooq |
Starter for using jOOQ to access SQL databases. An alternative to spring-boot-starter-data-jpa or spring-boot-starter-jdbc |
spring-boot-starter-json |
Starter for reading and writing json |
spring-boot-starter-jta-atomikos |
Starter for JTA transactions using Atomikos |
spring-boot-starter-jta-bitronix |
Starter for JTA transactions using Bitronix |
spring-boot-starter-mail |
Starter for using Java Mail and Spring Framework’s email sending support |
spring-boot-starter-mustache |
Starter for building web applications using Mustache views |
spring-boot-starter-oauth2-client |
Starter for using Spring Security’s OAuth2/OpenID Connect client features |
spring-boot-starter-oauth2-resource-server |
Starter for using Spring Security’s OAuth2 resource server features |
spring-boot-starter-quartz |
Starter for using the Quartz scheduler |
spring-boot-starter-security |
Starter for using Spring Security |
spring-boot-starter-test |
Starter for testing Spring Boot applications with libraries including JUnit, Hamcrest and Mockito |
spring-boot-starter-thymeleaf |
Starter for building MVC web applications using Thymeleaf views |
spring-boot-starter-validation |
Starter for using Java Bean Validation with Hibernate Validator |
spring-boot-starter-web |
Starter for building web, including RESTful, applications using Spring MVC. Uses Tomcat as the default embedded container |
spring-boot-starter-web-services |
Starter for using Spring Web Services |
spring-boot-starter-webflux |
Starter for building WebFlux applications using Spring Framework’s Reactive Web support |
spring-boot-starter-websocket |
Starter for building WebSocket applications using Spring Framework’s WebSocket support |
You can find the source code of the latest version of each Spring Boot starter at: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/tree/main/spring-boot-project/spring-boot-starters
Using Spring Boot Starters
Using Spring Boot Starters is pretty simple, for example supposing you want to access data using Hibernate, all you need to do is including the spring-boot:
<dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId> <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId> </dependency>
Then, obviously, you will need to include the specific dependency required for your Database. For example, if you are using MySQL:
<dependency> <groupId>mysql</groupId> <artifactId>mysql-connector-java</artifactId> </dependency>Found the article helpful? if so please follow us on Socials
