How to create a Spring Boot project

To start creating a Spring Boot project, you must first navigate to this website called Spring Initializer. It is an official website by the Spring team that allows you to select the language of the project, the version of Spring Boot, the metadata of the project, and add dependencies easily.

For this tutorial, we will select Maven as our build tool and Java as the programming language. By default, the latest version of Spring Boot will be selected. For attentive readers, you may have noticed some versions with SNAPSHOT written next to them. To put it simply, SNAPSHOT versions contain the latest features but are unstable and are generally used for testing purposes rather than production-level code.

Next, we will go through the Project Metadata section, examining each field one by one:

• Group: This is the namespace of your project or the top-level package. The name of the group is most likely to be that of the organization or company that creates the project. It follows the reverse domain convention, meaning “com” comes before the domain name.
• Artifact: This is the unique identifier of your project and will be the name of the JAR file generated (e.g., weather-app).
• Name: The name of your project/application. In most cases, the artifact and name will be the same.
• Description: Here, you can add a brief description of the project, which will appear in the pom.xml file and indicate the purpose of the application to other developers.
• Package Name: This will be the base package of your application and the root of your project structure.
• Packaging: This specifies the type of file you want once you build your project. Jar (Java Archive) is the most common format for Spring Boot applications.
• Java: This is the version of Java you would like to use for your project.

Now that we've filled out all the details for our project, it's time to add the dependencies that will bring our application to life. You might be wondering, 'What exactly are dependencies?' Simply put, dependencies are external libraries or tools that our project needs to function properly. Think of them as building blocks that save us time by providing ready-made functionality, so we don't have to reinvent the wheel.

It's quite common for a project to have several dependencies — they help us cut down on repetitive code and let us focus on the unique logic that drives our application. You can easily find a dependency by searching for its name or by browsing through categories to discover a whole set of related dependencies. For this tutorial, we’ll keep it simple and just select the Spring Web dependency to get started.

Once all your desired dependencies are selected click on the GENERATE button. This will automatically download a zip file with the name of your project. Unzip the file and open it in your preferred IDE, for me, I am using Intellij IDE as it is the best in the market in my opinion.

As you can see in the above image we have successfully created our project. To run the project click the green start button that appears next to the main function of your projects class. If all configurations are perfect then will get a message saying our application starts at port 8080.

And that’s all folks. We have created our first spring boot project. But don’t worry in the future we will add our first RESTful API.