spring-boot-starter versus spring-boot-starter-xxx

Question

I noticed that the Spring Boot Sample Data Redis declares the following dependencies:

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

See here for full POM: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/blob/v1.0.0.RC4/spring-boot-samples/spring-boot-sample-data-redis/pom.xml

I see no mention of the <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-redis</artifactId>

My question is: when do I use spring-boot-starter versus spring-boot-starter-xxx where xxx is the name of the project (here Redis)?

Dave Syer Dave Syer · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-05T17:22:09

The answer to the specific question: spring-boot-starter is a baseline for the others, and for standalone (non-web) apps that don't use any other Spring components - it has basic support for Spring, Logging, and Testing, but nothing else (no webapp features, no database etc.). Since all the other starters depend on it, once you use another one you can remove the vanilla starter. EDIT: see here https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/commit/77fd127e09963a844f8fb4e574e1f0d9d3424d4e.

Up to you on the redis starter, but I would use the starter if it exists, since it will typically cut down on the number of dependencies you need to declare. The redis one actually doesn't add a lot of value (hence it didn't exist until recently), but it probably ought to be used in the sample.

spring-boot-starter versus spring-boot-starter-xxx

1 Answers