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

Naming Pattern

In the Spring Boot framework, all the starters follow a similar naming pattern: spring-boot-starter-*, where * denotes a particular type of application.

Example, if we require to use Spring and JPA for database access, spring-boot-starter-data-jpa dependency in our pom.xml file of the project can be included.

<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId>
</dependency>

If we are developing REST API, spring-boot-starter-web dependency can be used.

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

If gradle is being used as build tool, then following can be added to build.gradle file in the project.

dependencies {
implementation 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-data-jpa'
implementation 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web'
}

Below are the jars which are added to project’s classpath on adding “spring-boot-starter-data-jpa”

Spring Boot Starters can be broadly classified into three categories

1. Production Starters
2. Application Starters
3. Technical Starters

Below is complete list of the starters available in above categories

Spring Boot Production Starters

Spring Boot Application Starters

Spring Boot Technical Starters