13.5 Starters

Starters 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.

The starters contain a lot of the dependencies that you need to get a project up and running quickly and with a consistent, supported set of managed transitive dependencies.

What’s in a name

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 allow you to search dependencies by name. For example, with the appropriate Eclipse or STS plugin installed, you can simply hit 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. A third-party starter for acme will be typically named acme-spring-boot-starter.

The following application starters are provided by Spring Boot under the org.springframework.boot group:

Table 13.1. Spring Boot application starters

Name Description Pom
spring-boot-starter-thymeleaf Starter for building MVC web applications using Thymeleaf views Pom
spring-boot-starter-ws Starter for using Spring Web Services. Deprecated as of 1.4 in favor of spring-boot-starter-web-services Pom
spring-boot-starter-data-couchbase Starter for using Couchbase document-oriented database and Spring Data Couchbase Pom
spring-boot-starter-artemis Starter for JMS messaging using Apache Artemis Pom
spring-boot-starter-web-services Starter for using Spring Web Services Pom
spring-boot-starter-mail Starter for using Java Mail and Spring Framework’s email sending support Pom
spring-boot-starter-data-redis Starter for using Redis key-value data store with Spring Data Redis and the Jedis client 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-data-gemfire Starter for using GemFire distributed data store and Spring Data GemFire Pom
spring-boot-starter-activemq Starter for JMS messaging using Apache ActiveMQ Pom
spring-boot-starter-data-elasticsearch Starter for using Elasticsearch search and analytics engine and Spring Data Elasticsearch Pom
spring-boot-starter-integration Starter for using Spring Integration Pom
spring-boot-starter-test Starter for testing Spring Boot applications with libraries including JUnit, Hamcrest and Mockito Pom
spring-boot-starter-hornetq Starter for JMS messaging using HornetQ. Deprecated as of 1.4 in favor of spring-boot-starter-artemis Pom
spring-boot-starter-jdbc Starter for using JDBC with the Tomcat JDBC connection pool Pom
spring-boot-starter-mobile Starter for building web applications using Spring Mobile Pom
spring-boot-starter-validation Starter for using Java Bean Validation with Hibernate Validator Pom
spring-boot-starter-hateoas Starter for building hypermedia-based RESTful web application with Spring MVC and Spring HATEOAS 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-neo4j Starter for using Neo4j graph database and Spring Data Neo4j Pom
spring-boot-starter-websocket Starter for building WebSocket applications using Spring Framework’s WebSocket support Pom
spring-boot-starter-aop Starter for aspect-oriented programming with Spring AOP and AspectJ Pom
spring-boot-starter-amqp Starter for using Spring AMQP and Rabbit MQ Pom
spring-boot-starter-data-cassandra Starter for using Cassandra distributed database and Spring Data Cassandra Pom
spring-boot-starter-social-facebook Starter for using Spring Social Facebook Pom
spring-boot-starter-jta-atomikos Starter for JTA transactions using Atomikos Pom
spring-boot-starter-security Starter for using Spring Security Pom
spring-boot-starter-mustache Starter for building MVC web applications using Mustache views Pom
spring-boot-starter-data-jpa Starter for using Spring Data JPA with Hibernate Pom
spring-boot-starter Core starter, including auto-configuration support, logging and YAML Pom
spring-boot-starter-velocity Starter for building MVC web applications using Velocity views. Deprecated since 1.4 Pom
spring-boot-starter-groovy-templates Starter for building MVC web applications using Groovy Templates views Pom
spring-boot-starter-freemarker Starter for building MVC web applications using FreeMarker views Pom
spring-boot-starter-batch Starter for using Spring Batch Pom
spring-boot-starter-redis Starter for using Redis key-value data store with Spring Data Redis and the Jedis client. Deprecated as of 1.4 in favor of spring-boot-starter-data-redis Pom
spring-boot-starter-social-linkedin Stater for using Spring Social LinkedIn Pom
spring-boot-starter-cache Starter for using Spring Framework’s caching support Pom
spring-boot-starter-data-solr Starter for using the Apache Solr search platform with Spring Data Solr Pom
spring-boot-starter-data-mongodb Starter for using MongoDB document-oriented database and Spring Data MongoDB Pom
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 Pom
spring-boot-starter-jta-narayana Spring Boot Narayana JTA Starter Pom
spring-boot-starter-cloud-connectors Starter for using Spring Cloud Connectors which simplifies connecting to services in cloud platforms like Cloud Foundry and Heroku Pom
spring-boot-starter-jta-bitronix Starter for JTA transactions using Bitronix Pom
spring-boot-starter-social-twitter Starter for using Spring Social Twitter Pom
spring-boot-starter-data-rest Starter for exposing Spring Data repositories over REST using Spring Data REST Pom

In addition to the application starters, the following starters can be used to add production ready features:

Table 13.2. Spring Boot production starters

Name Description Pom
spring-boot-starter-actuator Starter for using Spring Boot’s Actuator which provides production ready features to help you monitor and manage your application Pom
spring-boot-starter-remote-shell Starter for using the CRaSH remote shell to monitor and manage your application over SSH Pom

Finally, Spring Boot also includes some starters that can be used if you want to exclude or swap specific technical facets:

Table 13.3. Spring Boot technical starters

Name Description Pom
spring-boot-starter-undertow Starter for using Undertow as the embedded servlet container. An alternative to spring-boot-starter-tomcat 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-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
spring-boot-starter-log4j2 Starter for using Log4j2 for logging. An alternative to spring-boot-starter-logging Pom
[Tip] Tip
For a list of additional community contributed starters, see the README file in the spring-boot-starters module on GitHub.

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