Start with the Spring Initializr web site at http://start.spring.io.

The Initializr will help you set up your Spring Boot project. By filling out just a few fields, you can generate and download a zip file that contains (almost) everything you need to get started. Don’t worry, the Initializr is not a code generator in the traditional sense, but more of a generator for initial project scaffolding.

In the Dependencies field, type in: web, actuator, jpa, h2 and devtools. If you hit Enter after each tag is matched, it will be permanently selected. Feel free to customize the Group and Artifact coordinates as you see fit but keep the default Spring Boot Version.

Don’t be afraid to click “Switch to the full version” and explore the other Spring Boot options. You may even choose to start your project with a Gradle build configuration instead (however, I will assume Maven for the remainder of this journal).

Once the dependencies selected, click the the Generate Project button. When the download finishes, unzip the file and import the project into your development environment. I primarily use the IntelliJ IDE from JetBrains, so some of the steps that I describe may not match exactly, but they should be close.

Run the application.

Depending on your environment, the Run profile might be automatically configured for you. If not, just navigate the project source folders until you find the default Application class and run it manually. If everything goes well, you should see several colorful INFO messages logged out to the console and finally a Tomcat instance listening on the default port of 8080.

Try it out at: localhost:8080

You should see the default “White label” error page in your browser. Don’t worry, you haven’t done anything wrong, this is the default Spring Boot error page. The Initializr only generates just enough code to get you started and this is the expected result.

If you use the unix curl command instead, you will see a JSON error response. This is Spring Boot being smart about the requested Content Type. By default, Boot will return the most appropriate type in the response.

Ultimately, we may customize this behavior but for now, lets write some code.