Spring Boot Starters

Spring Boot provides a number of starters that allow us to add jars in the classpath. Spring Boot built-in starters make development easier and rapid. Spring Boot Starters are the dependency descriptors.

In the Spring Boot Framework, all the starters follow a similar naming pattern: spring-boot-starter-*, where * denotes a particular type of application. For example, if we want to use Spring and JPA for database access, we need to include the spring-boot-starter-data-jpa dependency in our pom.xml file of the project.

Third-Party Starters

We can also include third party starters in our project. But we do not use spring-boot-starter for including third party dependency. The spring-boot-starter is reserved for official Spring Boot artifacts. The third-party starter starts with the name of the project. For example, the third-party project name is abc, then the dependency name will be abc-spring-boot-starter.

The Spring Boot Framework provides the following application starters under the org.springframework.boot group.

Name	Description
spring-boot-starter-thymeleaf	It is used to build MVC web applications using Thymeleaf views.
spring-boot-starter-data-couchbase	It is used for the Couchbase document-oriented database and Spring Data Couchbase.
spring-boot-starter-artemis	It is used for JMS messaging using Apache Artemis.
spring-boot-starter-web-services	It is used for Spring Web Services.
spring-boot-starter-mail	It is used to support Java Mail and Spring Framework's email sending.
spring-boot-starter-data-redis	It is used for Redis key-value data store with Spring Data Redis and the Jedis client.
spring-boot-starter-web	It is used for building the web application, including RESTful applications using Spring MVC. It uses Tomcat as the default embedded container.
spring-boot-starter-data-gemfire	It is used to GemFire distributed data store and Spring Data GemFire.
spring-boot-starter-activemq	It is used in JMS messaging using Apache ActiveMQ.
spring-boot-starter-data-elasticsearch	It is used in Elasticsearch search and analytics engine and Spring Data Elasticsearch.
spring-boot-starter-integration	It is used for Spring Integration.
spring-boot-starter-test	It is used to test Spring Boot applications with libraries, including JUnit, Hamcrest, and Mockito.
spring-boot-starter-jdbc	It is used for JDBC with the Tomcat JDBC connection pool.
spring-boot-starter-mobile	It is used for building web applications using Spring Mobile.
spring-boot-starter-validation	It is used for Java Bean Validation with Hibernate Validator.
spring-boot-starter-hateoas	It is used to build a hypermedia-based RESTful web application with Spring MVC and Spring HATEOAS.
spring-boot-starter-jersey	It is used to build RESTful web applications using JAX-RS and Jersey. An alternative to spring-boot-starter-web.
spring-boot-starter-data-neo4j	It is used for the Neo4j graph database and Spring Data Neo4j.
spring-boot-starter-data-ldap	It is used for Spring Data LDAP.
spring-boot-starter-websocket	It is used for building the WebSocket applications. It uses Spring Framework's WebSocket support.
spring-boot-starter-aop	It is used for aspect-oriented programming with Spring AOP and AspectJ.
spring-boot-starter-amqp	It is used for Spring AMQP and Rabbit MQ.
spring-boot-starter-data-cassandra	It is used for Cassandra distributed database and Spring Data Cassandra.
spring-boot-starter-social-facebook	It is used for Spring Social Facebook.
spring-boot-starter-jta-atomikos	It is used for JTA transactions using Atomikos.
spring-boot-starter-security	It is used for Spring Security.
spring-boot-starter-mustache	It is used for building MVC web applications using Mustache views.
spring-boot-starter-data-jpa	It is used for Spring Data JPA with Hibernate.
spring-boot-starter	It is used for core starter, including auto-configuration support, logging, and YAML.
spring-boot-starter-groovy-templates	It is used for building MVC web applications using Groovy Template views.
spring-boot-starter-freemarker	It is used for building MVC web applications using FreeMarker views.
spring-boot-starter-batch	It is used for Spring Batch.
spring-boot-starter-social-linkedin	It is used for Spring Social LinkedIn.
spring-boot-starter-cache	It is used for Spring Framework's caching support.
spring-boot-starter-data-solr	It is used for the Apache Solr search platform with Spring Data Solr.
spring-boot-starter-data-mongodb	It is used for MongoDB document-oriented database and Spring Data MongoDB.
spring-boot-starter-jooq	It is used for jOOQ to access SQL databases. An alternative to spring-boot-starter-data-jpa or spring-boot-starter-jdbc.
spring-boot-starter-jta-narayana	It is used for Spring Boot Narayana JTA Starter.
spring-boot-starter-cloud-connectors	It is used for Spring Cloud Connectors that simplifies connecting to services in cloud platforms like Cloud Foundry and Heroku.
spring-boot-starter-jta-bitronix	It is used for JTA transactions using Bitronix.
spring-boot-starter-social-twitter	It is used for Spring Social Twitter.
spring-boot-starter-data-rest	It is used for exposing Spring Data repositories over REST using Spring Data REST.

Spring Boot Production Starters

Name	Description
spring-boot-starter-actuator	It is used for Spring Boot's Actuator that provides production-ready features to help you monitor and manage your application.
spring-boot-starter-remote-shell	It is used for the CRaSH remote shell to monitor and manage your application over SSH. Deprecated since 1.5.

Spring Boot Technical Starters

Name	Description
spring-boot-starter-undertow	It is used for Undertow as the embedded servlet container. An alternative to spring-boot-starter-tomcat.
spring-boot-starter-jetty	It is used for Jetty as the embedded servlet container. An alternative to spring-boot-starter-tomcat.
spring-boot-starter-logging	It is used for logging using Logback. Default logging starter.
spring-boot-starter-tomcat	It is used for Tomcat as the embedded servlet container. Default servlet container starter used by spring-boot-starter-web.
spring-boot-starter-log4j2	It is used for Log4j2 for logging. An alternative to spring-boot-starter-logging.