Master Spring Boot Starters, Parent, and DevTools for Faster Backend Development

Spring Boot Starters

Spring Boot provides Starter modules that bundle the most common JARs for a given technology stack, eliminating the need to manually select versions. For a basic REST controller the spring-boot-starter-web starter aggregates spring-web and other web‑related libraries that have been verified by the Spring team.

Spring Boot Starter Parent

The spring-boot-starter-parent is declared at the top of pom.xml and defines default versions for all spring-boot-starter-* dependencies as well as common components such as MySQL and MongoDB drivers.

<parent>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
    <version>3.5.4</version>
    <relativePath/> <!-- lookup parent from repository -->
</parent>

The parent imports spring-boot-dependencies, a Bill of Materials (BOM) that centralises version numbers for all Spring Boot starter modules, so individual dependencies do not need explicit <version> elements.

<parent>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-dependencies</artifactId>
    <version>3.5.4</version>
</parent>

If a dependency shares the same groupId and artifactId as one managed by the parent, omit the version element to avoid compatibility issues.

spring-boot-dependencies BOM

The BOM lists versions for common libraries such as mongo, mysql, and all spring-boot-starter-* artifacts.

spring-boot-maven-plugin

Spring Boot includes the spring-boot-maven-plugin by default, enabling the application to be run with a single Maven command.

$ mvn spring-boot:run

Spring Boot Development Tools (DevTools)

During local development, restarting the application after each code change can be tedious. Spring Boot DevTools automates this process by automatically restarting the application when compiled classes change.

Add the following dependency to pom.xml:

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

IntelliJ IDEA configuration

Enable automatic project builds:

Preferences → Build, Execution, Deployment → Compiler → Build project automatically

Allow auto‑make while the application is running:

Preferences → Advanced Settings → Compiler → Allow auto‑make to start even if developed application is currently running

After configuring, add a new endpoint (e.g., /workout) to a controller, save the file, and IntelliJ will trigger a restart. Verify the change by visiting http://localhost:8080/workout.