Create a Spring Boot project

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Goal

Generate a Spring Boot project with Spring Initializr and run it once before adding any code. After this page you will have a working items-api directory you can start the app from.

Prerequisites

• JDK 21 installed
• Maven installed
• What Spring Boot is

Use Spring Initializr

Spring Initializr is a web form at start.spring.io that hands you a zipped, ready-to-build Spring Boot project. We could generate the same pom.xml by hand, but Initializr is the source of truth — use it.

Open start.spring.io and set:

• Project: Maven
• Language: Java
• Spring Boot: 3.4.x (the highest 3.4 release shown — do not pick a SNAPSHOT; those are unreleased builds)
• Group: com.example
• Artifact: items-api
• Name: items-api
• Package name: com.example.itemsapi
• Packaging: Jar
• Java: 21
• Dependencies: click ADD DEPENDENCIES and add Spring Web

Click GENERATE. A file called items-api.zip downloads.

Unzip and run

unzip items-api.zip
cd items-api

The structure Maven expects:

items-api/
├── pom.xml
├── mvnw
├── mvnw.cmd
└── src/
    ├── main/
    │   ├── java/com/example/itemsapi/ItemsApiApplication.java
    │   └── resources/application.properties
    └── test/
        └── java/com/example/itemsapi/ItemsApiApplicationTests.java

mvnw is the Maven wrapper — a script that downloads the right Maven version for this project on first run. Use it instead of the system mvn so the build is reproducible.

Start the app:

./mvnw spring-boot:run

Expected output (trimmed):

  .   ____          _            __ _ _
 /\\ / ___'_ __ _ _(_)_ __  __ _ \ \ \ \
( ( )\___ | '_ | '_| | '_ \/ _` | \ \ \ \
 \\/  ___)| |_)| | | | | || (_| |  ) ) ) )
  '  |____| .__|_| |_|_| |_\__, | / / / /
 =========|_|==============|___/=/_/_/_/

 :: Spring Boot ::                (v3.4.0)

... Tomcat started on port 8080 (http) with context path '/'
... Started ItemsApiApplication in 1.234 seconds

In a second terminal, confirm the server is up:

curl -i http://localhost:8080/

HTTP/1.1 404

A 404 is the right answer here — the app is running, but you have not registered any handlers yet. That is the next page.

Stop the server with Ctrl-C.

Next → First controller