maven - Spring Boot - parent pom when you already have a parent pom

Question

Is there a specific recommended approach to the inclusion of the spring-boot parent pom into projects that already have a required parent POM?

What do you recommend for projects that need to extend from an organizational parent (this is extremely common and even something many/most projects published to Maven central depending on the feeder repos they come from). Most of the build stuff is related to creating executable JARs (e.g. running embedded Tomcat/Jetty). There are ways to structure things so that you can get all the dependencies without extending from a parent (similar to composition vs. inheritance). You can't get a build stuff that way though.

So is it preferable to include all of the spring-boot parent pom inside of the required parent POM or to simply have a POM dependency within the project POM file.

Other options?

TIA,

Scott

Answer 1

You can use the spring-boot-starter-parent like a "bom" (c.f. Spring and Jersey other projects that support this feature now), and include it only in the dependency management section with scope=import.That way you get a lot of the benefits of using it (i.e. dependency management) without replacing the settings in your actual parent.

The 2 main other things it does are

1. define a load of properties for quickly setting versions of dependencies that you want to override
2. configure some plugins with default configuration (principally the Spring Boot maven plugin). So those are the things you will have to do manually if you use your own parent.

Example provided in Spring Boot documentation:

<dependencyManagement>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <!-- Import dependency management from Spring Boot -->
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-dependencies</artifactId>
            <version>2.1.3.RELEASE</version>
            <type>pom</type>
            <scope>import</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>