11.2 Adding classpath dependencies
Spring Boot provides a number of “Starters” that make easy to add jars to your classpath. Our sample application has already used spring-boot-starter-parent
in the parent
section of the POM. The spring-boot-starter-parent
is a special starter that provides useful Maven defaults. It also provides a dependency-management
section so that you can omit version
tags for “blessed” dependencies.
Other “Starters” simply provide dependencies that you are likely to need when developing a specific type of application. Since we are developing a web application, we will add a spring-boot-starter-web
dependency — but before that, let’s look at what we currently have.
$ mvn dependency:tree [INFO] com.example:myproject:jar:0.0.1-SNAPSHOT
The mvn dependency:tree
command prints a tree representation of your project dependencies. You can see that spring-boot-starter-parent
provides no dependencies by itself. Let’s edit our pom.xml
and add the spring-boot-starter-web
dependency just below the parent
section:
<dependencies> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId> <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId> </dependency> </dependencies>
If you run mvn dependency:tree
again, you will see that there are now a number of additional dependencies, including the Tomcat web server and Spring Boot itself.