Spring Boot supports the number of “Starters” that make developer life easy so that more focus on functionality implementation instead of thing about dependencies and it’s version. If any starter is added then it will add all dependent jars in your classpath.

In our previous article, Spring Boot Maven Application has used two Spring Boot starters as given below:

spring-boot-starter-parent

It’s a special starter that inherits useful maven defaults. It also provides dependency management so that omit version tags for dependencies.

 <parent>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
        <version>1.5.21.RELEASE</version>
    </parent>

See Also: spring-boot-starter-parent in Detail.

spring-boot-starter-web

It’s add in the dependencies section to make application as a web which will add all required dependencies for a web application.

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

To get your application dependency list using command mvn dependency:tree which represents dependencies in the form of a tree. You can use the command as below:

mvn dependency:tree

Spring Boot Starters

Here is a list of Spring Boot Starters which used for adding specific features to your application.

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

Spring Boot starters for Technical

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

Spring Boot starters for Production

Name	Description
spring-boot-starter-actuator	The actuator provides production-ready features for monitor, audit and manages your application.
spring-boot-starter-remote-shell	CRaSH remote shell use to monitor and manage your application over SSH. Deprecated since 1.5.