Spring Boot - Build Systems

In Spring Boot, choosing a build system is an important task. We recommend Maven or Gradle as they provide a good support for dependency management. Spring does not support well other build systems.

Dependency Management

Spring Boot team provides a list of dependencies to support the Spring Boot version for its every release. You do not need to provide a version for dependencies in the build configuration file. Spring Boot automatically configures the dependencies version based on the release. Remember that when you upgrade the Spring Boot version, dependencies also will upgrade automatically.

Note − If you want to specify the version for dependency, you can specify it in your configuration file. However, the Spring Boot team highly recommends that it is not needed to specify the version for dependency.

Maven Dependency

For Maven configuration, we should inherit the Spring Boot Starter parent project to manage the Spring Boot Starters dependencies. For this, simply we can inherit the starter parent in our pom.xml file as shown below.

<parent>
   <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
   <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
   <version>1.5.8.RELEASE</version>
</parent>

We should specify the version number for Spring Boot Parent Starter dependency. Then for other starter dependencies, we do not need to specify the Spring Boot version number. Observe the code given below −

<dependencies>
   <dependency>
      <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
      <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
   </dependency>
</dependencies>

Gradle Dependency

We can import the Spring Boot Starters dependencies directly into build.gradle file. We do not need Spring Boot start Parent dependency like Maven for Gradle. Observe the code given below −

buildscript {
   ext {
      springBootVersion = '1.5.8.RELEASE'
   }
   repositories {
      mavenCentral()
   }
   dependencies {
      classpath("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-gradle-plugin:${springBootVersion}")
   }
}

Similarly, in Gradle, we need not specify the Spring Boot version number for dependencies. Spring Boot automatically configures the dependency based on the version.

dependencies {
   compile('org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web')
}