Step‑by‑Step Guide to Deploying Flowable 6.6.0 with Spring Boot for Workflow Management

This article provides a step‑by‑step guide for setting up Flowable 6.6.0, deploying the flowable‑ui.war on Tomcat, and configuring a Spring Boot backend project to run a leave‑approval workflow.

It starts with downloading the Flowable distribution, placing flowable‑ui.war in Tomcat, and accessing the UI at http://localhost:8080/flowable‑ui using the default admin credentials.

The guide then shows how to model the process in the Flowable App Modeler, explains the BPMN elements (events, sequence flows, gateways, user tasks) and provides the full BPMN XML definition.

Next, it details the required Maven dependencies (

<dependency>org.flowable:flowable‑spring‑boot‑starter:6.6.0</dependency>

and MySQL connector), the application.yml datasource configuration, and the database tables created by Flowable (ACT_RE_, ACT_RU_, ACT_HI_, ACT_ID_, ACT_GE_).

The article lists the main Flowable engine services (RepositoryService, RuntimeService, IdentityService, TaskService, HistoryService, etc.) and demonstrates Java code that deploys the BPMN zip, starts a process instance, claims and completes tasks for student and teacher groups, and queries historic data.

Finally, it provides reference links, additional resources, and promotional notes.