Spring Boot starters are a bunch of convenient dependency descriptors that you can add to your Spring Boot application. Spring Boot provides several starters to make application development effortless and rapid.

A starter is just a Gradle or Maven module that supplies all the necessary dependencies to start with specific functionality.

In other words, Spring Boot starters is a one-stop-shop for all the Spring and related technologies that you need to build a Spring application.

For example, if you want to use Spring Data JPA with Spring Boot to access MySQL database, just include spring-boot-starter-data-jpa starter dependency to your project.

Similarly, if you want to get started with the Thymeleaf template engine with Spring Boot, just include the spring-boot-starter-thymeleaf dependency.

Naming Convention: All the Spring Boot starters follow a similar naming convention: spring-boot-starter-* where * represents a particular type of application. This naming pattern is intended to help when you need to quickly find a starter, especially in Maven.

List of Spring Boot Starters

Spring Boot provides three types of starter dependencies under the org.springframework.boot group.

1. 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-cloud-connectors Starter for using Spring Cloud Connectors that simplifies connecting to services in cloud platforms like Cloud Foundry and Heroku. Deprecated in favor of Java CFEnv
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-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, 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

2. 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

3. 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

3rd-party Spring Boot Starters

You can also include 3rd party starters in your project or even build your own starter.

Typically a 3rd-party starter name starts with the the project name followed by the -spring-boot-starter suffix.

For example, a 3rd-party starter project called myproject artifact would be named myproject-spring-boot-starter. This is because the spring-boot prefix is reserved for official Spring Boot artifacts.

You can find a complete list of 3rd-party starters on GitHub.

Using Spring Boot Starters

To use a specific starter in your Spring Boot application, include the starter dependency to your build.gradle (for Gradle) or pom.xml (for Maven) file.

It will automatically download all the required dependencies and add them to the classpath.

Let us look at the following example that includes the spring-boot-starter-web dependencies to the build.gradle file to build a RESTful web service in Spring Boot:

implementation 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web'

Here is what a simple RESTful controller looks like:

@RestController
public class GreetingController {

    @GetMapping("/hi/{name}")
    public String welcome(@PathVariable String name) {
        return "Welcome " + name + "👋";
    }
}

Conclusion

In this article, we looked at what are Spring Boot starters, how they help us keep dependency management simple and clean, and how to use them in a Spring Boot application.

Spring Boot provides three groups of starter dependencies: application, production, and technical. You just need to add the required starter dependency to your dependencies list. The build tool (Maven or Gradle) will automatically download all required dependencies and add them to the classpath.

Furthermore, you can also build your own Spring Boot starter or use 3rd-party starters in your project.

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