Before Spring Boot was introduced, Spring Developers used to spend a lot of time on Dependency management. Spring Boot Starters were introduced to solve this problem so that the developers can spend more time on actual code than Dependencies. Spring Boot Starters are dependency descriptors that can be added under the <dependencies> section in pom.xml. There are around 50+ Spring Boot Starters for different Spring and related technologies. These starters give all the dependencies under a single name. For example, if you want to use Spring Data JPA for database access, you can include spring-boot-starter-data-jpa dependency.
The advantages of using Starters are as follows:
- Increase productivity by decreasing the Configuration time for developers.
- Managing the POM is easier since the number of dependencies to be added is decreased.
- Tested, Production-ready, and supported dependency configurations.
- No need to remember the name and version of the dependencies.
Spring Boot Starter Data JPA is illustrated below:
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
This gives all the required dependencies and can be seen under the Maven tab in IntelliJ IDEA.
In earlier days, developers used to include all those dependencies. Now Spring Boot Starters provides all those with just a single dependency. The official starters follow a naming convention spring-boot-starter-*, where * denotes application type. For example, if we want to build web including RESTful applications using Spring MVC we have to use spring-boot-starter-web dependency.
Third-Party Starters
If you want to make your own starter or other third-party starters name should not start with spring-boot as it reserved for official Spring Boot Starters. It can start with the name of the project. For example, if the name of the project is gfg-code-template, then the name of the starter can be gfg-code-template-spring-boot-starter.
Here out we will be discussing all 3 starters and the following starters are provided by the Spring Boot under org.springframework.boot group. They are namely and covered as follows:
- Application Starters
- Production Starters
- Technical Starters
Let us elaborate these starters in the same sequential order which is as follows:
(A) Spring Boot Application 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-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-r2dbc | Starter for using Spring Data R2DBC |
| 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-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-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-rsocket | Starter for building RSocket clients and servers |
| spring-boot-starter-security | Starter for using Spring Security |
| spring-boot-starter-test | Starter for testing Spring Boot applications with libraries including JUnit Jupiter, 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 |
(B) Spring Boot Production Starters
|
Name |
Description |
|---|---|
| spring-boot-starter-actuator | Starter for using Spring Boot’s Actuator which provides production-ready features to help you monitor and manage your application |
(C) Spring Boot Technical Starters
|
Name |
Description |
|---|---|
| spring-boot-starter-jetty | Starter for using Jetty as the embedded servlet container. An alternative to spring-boot-starter-tomcat |
| spring-boot-starter-log4j2 | Starter for using Log4j2 for logging. An alternative to spring-boot-starter-logging |
| spring-boot-starter-logging | Starter for logging using Logback. Default logging starter |
| spring-boot-starter-reactor-netty | Starter for using Reactor Netty as the embedded reactive HTTP server. |
| spring-boot-starter-tomcat | Starter for using Tomcat as the embedded servlet container. Default servlet container starter used by spring-boot-starter-web |
| spring-boot-starter-undertow | Starter for using Undertow as the embedded servlet container. An alternative to spring-boot-starter-tomcat |
