Documentation Overview

This section provides a brief overview of Spring Boot reference documentation. It serves as a map for the rest of the document.

1. First Steps

If you are getting started with Spring Boot or 'Spring' in general, start with the following topics:

You should always ensure that you are running a supported version of Spring Boot.

Depending on the version that you are upgrading to, you can find some additional tips here:

Ready to actually start using Spring Boot? We have you covered:

Build systems: Maven | Gradle | Ant | Starters
Best practices: Code Structure | @Configuration | @EnableAutoConfiguration | Beans and Dependency Injection
Running your code: IDE | Packaged | Maven | Gradle
Packaging your app: Production jars
Spring Boot CLI: Using the CLI

Need more details about Spring Boot’s core features? The following content is for you:

If you develop Spring Boot web applications, take a look at the following content:

Servlet Web Applications: Spring MVC, Jersey, Embedded Servlet Containers
Reactive Web Applications: Spring Webflux, Embedded Servlet Containers
Graceful Shutdown: Graceful Shutdown
Spring Security: Default Security Configuration, Auto-configuration for OAuth2, SAML
Spring Session: Auto-configuration for Spring Session
Spring HATEOAS: Auto-configuration for Spring HATEOAS

If your application deals with a datastore, you can see how to configure that here:

If your application uses any messaging protocol, see one or more of the following sections:

JMS: Auto-configuration for ActiveMQ and Artemis, Sending and Receiving messages through JMS
AMQP: Auto-configuration for RabbitMQ
Kafka: Auto-configuration for Spring Kafka
RSocket: Auto-configuration for Spring Framework’s RSocket Support
Spring Integration: Auto-configuration for Spring Integration

If your application needs IO capabilities, see one or more of the following sections:

Spring Boot provides first-class support for building efficient container images. You can read more about it here:

Efficient Container Images: Tips to optimize container images such as Docker images
Dockerfiles: Building container images using dockerfiles
Cloud Native Buildpacks: Support for Cloud Native Buildpacks with Maven and Gradle

When you are ready to push your Spring Boot application to production, we have some tricks that you might like:

Spring Boot applications can be converted into native executables using GraalVM. You can read more about our native image support here:

GraalVM Native Images: Introduction | Key Differences with the JVM | Ahead-of-Time Processing
Getting Started: Buildpacks | Native Build Tools
Testing: JVM | Native Build Tools
Advanced Topics: Nested Configuration Properties | Converting JARs | Known Limitations

Finally, we have a few topics for more advanced users:

Spring Boot Applications Deployment: Cloud Deployment | OS Service
Build tool plugins: Maven | Gradle
Appendix: Application Properties | Configuration Metadata | Auto-configuration Classes | Test Auto-configuration Annotations | Executable Jars | Dependency Versions