Spring Initializr

Spring Initializr provides an extensible API to generate JVM-based projects with implementations for several common concepts:

• Basic language generation for Java, Kotlin and Groovy.

• Build system abstraction with implementations for Apache Maven and Gradle.

• .gitignore support.

• Several hook-points for custom resources generations.

The various options for the projects are expressed in a metadata model that allows you to configure the list of dependencies, supported JVM and platform versions, etc.

Spring Initializr also exposes web endpoints to generate an actual project and also serve its metadata in a well-known format to allow third-party clients to provide the necessary assistance.

A set of optional conventions for Spring Boot projects is provided and are used in our production instance at https://start.spring.io. To better understand how our service is configured, you may want to check the companion project and, in particular, the configuration of our instance. Such configuration is also described in details in the documentation.

Note	While Spring Initializr is available on Maven Central, it is still in a pre 1.0 state and major refactoring are still possible. Check the milestones page for an overview of the changes.

Installation and Getting Started

The reference documentation is available in HTML format.

Modules

Spring Initializr has the following modules:

• initializr-actuator: optional module to provide additional information and statistics on project generation.

• initializr-bom: provides a Bill of Materials for easier dependency management in your project.

• initializr-docs: documentation.

• initializr-generator: core project generation library.

• initializr-generator-spring: optional module defining the conventions for a typical Spring Boot project. Can be reused or replaced by your own conventions.

• initializr-generator-test: test infrastructure for project generation.

• initializr-metadata: metadata infrastructure for various aspects of the project.

• initializr-service-sample: showcases a basic custom instance.

• initializr-version-resolver: optional module to extract version numbers from an arbitrary POM.

• initializr-web: web endpoints for third party clients.

Supported interfaces

Spring Initializr can be used as follows:

• On the command-line with the Spring Boot CLI or simply with cURL or HTTPie.

• In your IDE if you are using STS, IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, NetBeans (with this plugin) or VSCode (with the vscode-spring-initializr plugin).

• With a custom Web UI (check ours at https://start.spring.io).

There are other command-line integrations out there and you can also build your own!

Running your own instance

You can easily run your own instance. The initializr-web modules uses Spring Boot so when it is added to a project, it will trigger the necessary auto-configuration to deploy the service.

The initializr-service-sample showcases a basic custom instance with dedicated metadata.

Building from Source

You need Java 1.8 and a bash-like shell.

Building

Invoke the build at the root of the project:

$ ./mvnw clean install

To generate the docs as well, you should enable the full profile:

$ ./mvnw clean install -Pfull

License

Spring Initializr is Open Source software released under the Apache 2.0 license.