Building a custom Spring Boot Starter - From theory to practice – Egor Voronianskii

Building a custom Spring Boot Starter - From theory to practice

February 26, 2025

Introduction

Spring Boot starters are key feature of the Spring Boot ecosystem. They simplify dependency management and auto — configuration. A starter mix of dependencies and auto — configuration.It provides specific features with little setup needed. Spring Boot offers many official starters. However, you may need to create a custom starter for reusable functionality across different projects.

In this guide, we’ll look at the theory and practice fo building a custom Spring Boot starter. We’ll learn how to start working under the hood and create a real — world example that you can use as template for you own custom starter.

Understanding Spring Boot starter

What is a Spring Boot starter?

A Spring Boot starter is a special type of module that serves two primary purposes:

Provide a curated set of dependencies that integrate smoothly with one another.
Offers auto — configuration capabilities to enable specific functionaility with minimal configuration.

Key components of a custom starter

A typical custom starter consists of the following components:

Autoconfigure module: contains the auto-configuration code and condition — based configuration.
Starter module: Alightweight module. It includes the autoconfigure module and the necessary dependencies.
Properties class: Defines configurable properties for your starter.
Configuration class: Contains the actual beams and configuration logic.

Naming conventions

Spring Boot has specific naming conventions for custom starters:

Autoconfigure module: {name}-spring-boot-autoconfigure.
Starter module: {name}-spring-boot-starter
Don’t start you module name with spring boot unless you’re contributing to the Spring Boot project