Spring Boot – Setting up a Development Environment

In our previous Article, we have discussed an overview of Spring Boot. Through this article we will learn about, setup an environment which allows us to develop & run Spring Boot applications.

Spring Boot Environment setup

In order to setup the Spring Boot Environment, to develop the applications; below things are required to be installed on your system; these are the prerequisites;

• Java (1.8 or Above)
• Maven (Latest stable version)
• Eclipse IDE (Latest stable version)
• MongoDB (optional) – You need to install it, when you want to use this database.

Verify whether Java is installed

First, check whether Java is installed or not. Go to the command prompt and type the below command to verify whether Java is installed. It also displays the version of Java installed on your system.

java -version

 Below is the output you would see, if Java is installed on your System.

If Java is NOT installed on your System; you need to Download and install Java Platform Development Kit (JDK) (a set of tools which are used to develop Java applications) from it’ official website.

Maven verification

Next step is, verify whether maven is installed or not, by typing the below command at the command prompt; Maven is a tool which is used to build & manage the Applications.

mvn -version

And it displays the output, which looks like below;

If  maven is missing in your system; you can install it from the official website “Apache Maven“.

Eclipse IDE Software

Another software we need to install is, the Editor; to allow to write the Spring Boot applications code. I recommend to use the IDEs, instead of plain Editors. IDEs provide lot of features, which saves our time to develop the Applications. Eclipse IDE is one such IDE mostly we use and we can download it from it’s website “Eclipse” (click on eclipse IDE for Java developer to download the Eclipse IDE).

MongoDB Software installation

Finally, if you want to use the database (MongoDB), you need to follow below steps.

• Download & install MongoDB; an open-source, non-relational document based database. Unlike the traditional relational databases, it will save the data in documents (like JSON) form.
• You can also download MongoDB compass, the GUI based application.
• Type below command from the command prompt, once the installation is done;

mongo

If MongoDB is installed successfully, you will see below result;

Once all these prerequisites are installed on the System; we are now ready to develop the Spring Boot applications. We will look more in details, about Spring Boot in our upcoming Articles.