Spring Boot Maven Plugin Explained In Detail

Posted On September 14, 2023September 10, 2023

Maven is a build automation tool for Java. The Spring Boot Maven plugin provides various capabilities for developing/executing Spring Boot projects with Maven. In this article, we will take a closer look at this plugin.

What is the Spring Boot Maven Plugin

The Spring Boot Maven plugin simplifies the process of building, packaging, and running Spring Boot applications using Maven.  Some of the things that you can do using this plugin are:

• Build/package Spring Boot applications as executable JAR or WAR files. These files include all necessary dependencies, making it easy to deploy and run Spring Boot applications.
• Start an embedded application server (such as Tomcat or Jetty) and deploy your Spring Boot application on it during development and testing.
• Manage and resolve dependencies specific to Spring Boot, ensuring that you have compatible versions of Spring Boot libraries and other related dependencies.
• Simplify configuration management by setting Spring Boot properties directly in your pom.xml or external property files.
• Repackage an existing JAR or WAR file as a Spring Boot executable JAR.
• Leverage Spring Boot DevTools, allowing automatic application restarts and hot swapping of code changes during development

How to use the Spring Boot Maven Plugin

In order to use the plugin, the following needs to be specified in the project pom file:

<build>
<plugins>
<plugin>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>2.5.5</version>
</plugin>
</plugins>
</build>

Plugin Goals

Once configured, you can use the various goals of the plugin to build, package, and run your Spring Boot application.

Here is a list of some of the important plugin goals:

• mvn spring-boot:run – The “run” goal starts the embedded application server and deploys the Spring Boot application on it.
• mvn spring-boot:repackage – This goal repackages an existing JAR or WAR file as a Spring Boot executable JAR.
• spring-boot:start: This goal starts the application in the background as a background process.
• spring-boot:stop: This goal stops a Spring Boot application that was previously started using the spring-boot:start goal.

Further Reading

• Java and Spring for Beginners with Spring Boot
• Apache Maven – Beginner to Guru
• Master Spring Boot and Spring

Conclusion

So to conclude, the Spring Boot Maven Plugin helps to easily develop Spring Boot applications with Maven. It has various goals that can deploy the application in an embedded server, package the application as a Jar/War file, and do much more. It makes developing Spring Boot applications with Maven much easier and quicker.