Installation & Setup

Prerequisites

Make sure the following are installed on your machine:

Java 17 is an LTS (Long Term Support) release and is the minimum standard for Spring Boot 3.x.

Spring Initializr

The fastest way to create a Spring Boot project:

1. Go to start.spring.io
2. Select Maven Project (or Gradle)
3. Set the Java version to 17
4. Add the dependency: Spring Web
5. Click Generate → download the ZIP
6. Extract it into your working folder

IDE Setup

IntelliJ IDEA (Recommended)

• Install the Spring Boot plugin from the marketplace
• Open the project: File → Open → select the project folder
• IntelliJ automatically recognizes Spring Boot projects

Eclipse

• Install Spring Tools 4 from the Eclipse Marketplace
• Import: File → Import → Maven → Existing Maven Projects

VS Code

• Install the Extension Pack for Java + Spring Boot Extension Pack extensions
• Open the project folder

Creating Your First Project

After extracting, open a terminal in the project folder:

# With Maven
mvn spring-boot:run

# Or with Gradle
./gradlew bootRun

Wait until you see log output like this:

Tomcat started on port 8080 (http) with context path '/'
Started MyApp in 2.345 seconds

Verification

Open a browser and navigate to:

http://localhost:8080

You'll see the Whitelabel Error Page — this is normal, it means the application is running! We haven't created any controllers yet, so there are no pages to display.

Frequently Used Commands

mvn spring-boot:run          # Run the application
mvn clean package            # Build the JAR
java -jar target/app.jar     # Run the JAR
mvn spring-boot:stop         # Stop (if running in the background)

Common Troubleshooting

Your project is now running on localhost:8080. In the next chapter, we'll understand the project structure of Spring Boot so you know the purpose of every folder and file.