How To Create Spring Boot Application In Intellij

In this quick post, we will learn aboutbuilding a Spring Boot application using IntelliJ. The main purpose of this post is to help anyone new to Spring Boot get rolling quickly writing Spring applications with Spring Boot in IntelliJ. If you are a beginner with Spring Boot, I highly recommend starting with our Spring Boot.

Introduction

IntelliJ IDEA is the most popular Java IDE. IntelliJ IDEA provides first-class support to create and run Spring Boot based applications. We can create and configure Spring Boot application in the following ways.

Import Spring Boot project in IntelliJ IDEA.
Use built-in support for Spring Initializr in the IntelliJ IDEA editor.

We are using the built-in support of the IDE to create our Spring Boot application.

[pullquote align="normal"]Spring Boot is available in the Ultimate edition only. [/pullquote]

1. Create Spring Boot Project With IntelliJ

To start, the process, open IntelliJ IDEA and click on the new project option.

Build a Spring Boot application using IntelliJ IDEA

2. Select Spring Initializr from the project type on the left side panel. Select the correct JDK from the Project SDK drop-down (Spring Boot 2.x require a minimum JDK 8).

Build a Spring Boot application using IntelliJ IDEA

3. Enter the Maven project properties as per your project requirements and click on the next step.

Build a Spring Boot application using IntelliJ IDEA

4. Select the Spring Boot version and other required dependencies for your project. Based on the selected dependencies, it will add correct Spring Boot Starters in the pom.xml file.

Build a Spring Boot application using IntelliJ IDEA

5. In the last part of the wizard, we need to select a project name and project location. Once selected click on the "Finish" button.

Build a Spring Boot application using IntelliJ IDEA

Once finished, IntelliJ IDEA import all the required dependencies and open the newly created a project to work on.

Build a Spring Boot application using IntelliJ IDEA

2. The pom.xml file

The pom.xml file contains all the building blocks for the Spring Boot application. Open the pom.xml file in the project's root module.

                <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>    <groupId>com.javadevjournal</groupId>    <artifactId>demoproject</artifactId>    <version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>    <packaging>jar</packaging>    <name>sample-project-IntelliJ</name>    <description>How to create Spring Boot project using IntelliJ</description>    <parent>       <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>       <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>       <version>2.0.1.RELEASE</version>       <relativePath />       <!-- lookup parent from repository -->    </parent>    <properties>       <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>       <project.reporting.outputEncoding>UTF-8</project.reporting.outputEncoding>       <java.version>1.8</java.version>    </properties>    <dependencies>       <dependency>          <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>          <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-thymeleaf</artifactId>       </dependency>       <dependency>          <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>          <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>       </dependency>       <dependency>          <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>          <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>          <scope>test</scope>       </dependency>    </dependencies>    <build>       <plugins>          <plugin>             <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>             <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>          </plugin>       </plugins>    </build> </project>

We added spring-boot-starter-parent as the parent of our Spring Boot project. This parent provides several features in the Spring Boot application

Configuration – Java Version and Other Properties.
Dependency Management – Version of dependencies
Default Plugin Configuration

For more detail, read What is Spring Boot

3. Spring Boot Main Application Class

When we created this project, Spring Initializr created the following class automatically to start our Spring Boot application.

                package com.javadevjournal.demoproject;  import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication; import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;  @SpringBootApplication public class SampleProjectIntelliJApplication {    public static void main(String[] args) {         SpringApplication.run(SampleProjectIntelliJApplication.class, args);   } }

4. Run Application

Spring Boot main class contains the main method. This is just a standard method that follows the Java convention for an application entry point. Our main method delegates to Spring Boot'sSpringApplication class by callingrun.SpringApplication bootstraps our application, starting Spring. We can run our application from the IntelliJ by clicking on the run application icon

Build a Spring Boot application using IntelliJ IDEA

As an alternative, we can use the run goal to start our application. Typemvn spring-boot:run from the root project directory to start the application. You should see output similar to the following.

Build a Spring Boot application using IntelliJ IDEA

[pullquote align="normal"] Read our article Building an Application with Spring Boot to build a web application using Spring Boot [/pullquote]

Summary

In this small post, we covered building a Spring Boot application using IntelliJ. IntelliJ is really a powerful editor and provides first-class support to create and run Spring Boot based web applications.