Spring Boot Starter Parent Usage in Maven

calendar Aug 21, 2018 · 1 min read  ·
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I quite often see Spring Boot projects which are using the spring-boot-starter-parent as the following:

 1<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 2  xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
 3  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
 4
 5  <parent>
 6    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
 7    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
 8    <version>2.0.4.RELEASE</version>
 9    <relativePath/>
10  </parent>
11
12  <properties>
13    <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>
14    <project.reporting.outputEncoding>UTF-8</project.reporting.outputEncoding>
15    <java.version>1.8</java.version>
16  </properties>
17  ...
18  <build>
19    <plugins>
20      <plugin>
21        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
22        <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
23      </plugin>
24    </plugins>
25  </build>
26</project>

So far so good. Notices something? I have to mention that you can do it a little bit shorter like this:

 1<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 2  xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
 3  <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
 4
 5  <parent>
 6    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
 7    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
 8    <version>2.0.4.RELEASE</version>
 9    <relativePath/>
10  </parent>
11
12  ...
13  <build>
14    <plugins>
15      <plugin>
16        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
17        <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
18      </plugin>
19    </plugins>
20  </build>
21</project>

The properties defined in the first example are already defined in the spring-boot-starter-parent pom file which means you do not need to define them another time cause you inherit them via the parent.