Getting Started
Describes various wizards for creating Spring Boot Starter Projects and modifying a project's 'starter' dependencies.
This Wizard uses the start.spring.io webservice to generate a Spring Boot Starter project. The project is imported into your workspace.
This wizard is accessible via menu File >> New >> Spring Starter Project.
On the first page you can set various basic project options:
Note that by default, the wizard uses the public https://start.spring.io url which points to a public web-service provided by Pivotal. However, it is also possible to use a customised webservice you develop and run in-house. Simply change the url at the top of the page. The wizard will remember the url and use that service from now on (until you change it again). This could be useful, for example, if you fork the service source code on github to include your own, in-house developed spring-boot starters).
The second page is the more interesting one, where you search for and choose various 'Starter' dependencies:
The frequently used section at the top of the page shows up to a dozen or so dependencies that you have used most frequently in the past, for easy access.
Hovering over a starter dependencies provides additional information, such as links to related documentation and tutorials:
Although the wizard has a 'Language' pull-down allowing to choose Java, Kotlin or Groovy, only the Java language is supported by STS out of the box. Projects for Kotlin and Groovy can be generated but tooling to work with these languages is not included with STS. You can attempt to install additional Eclipse plugins to work with Kotlin or Groovy. However, the wizard has no specific support for them and does not attempt to configure the imported projects to work with these additional plugins.
If you created a project with the New Spring Starter Wizard and you change your mind later about which Starter dependencies you wanted. You can use this wizard to remove or add aditional starter dependencies.
The wizard is accessed from the pom.xml context menu (i.e. right-click on the pom.xml file in the package or project explorer) under Spring >> Edit Starters.
This wizard imports sample projects from a number of Tutorials available at the spring.io website. The wizard imports the sample code ready for use in your workspace and opens the web-page of the selected tutorial in a web browser.
This wizard is accessible from menu File >> New >> Import Spring Getting Started Content.
There's a detailed tutorial on how to use this wizard available here.