Table of Contents

1. Overview

This tutorial illustrates how to set up the Spring dependencies via Maven. The latest Spring releases can be found on Maven Central.

2. Basic Spring Dependencies With Maven

Spring is designed to be highly modular – using one part of Spring should not and does not require another. For example, the basic Spring Context can be without the Persistence or the MVC Spring libraries.

Let's start with a fundamental Maven setup which will only use the spring-context dependency:

<properties> <org.springframework.version>5.2.8.RELEASE</org.springframework.version> </properties> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework</groupId> <artifactId>spring-context</artifactId> <version>${org.springframework.version}</version> <scope>runtime</scope> </dependency>

This dependency – spring-context – defines the actual Spring Injection Container and has a small number of dependencies: spring-core, spring-expression, spring-aop, and spring-beans. These augment the container by enabling support for some of the core Spring technologies: the Core Spring utilities, the Spring Expression Language (SpEL), the Aspect-Oriented Programming support and the JavaBeans mechanism.

Note we're defining the dependency in the runtime scope – this will make sure that there are no compile-time dependencies on any Spring specific APIs. For more advanced use cases, the runtime scope may be removed from some selected Spring dependencies, but for simpler projects, there is no need to compile against Spring to make full use of the framework.

Also, note that JDK 8 is the minimum Java version required for Spring 5.2. It also supports JDK 11 as the current LTS branch and JDK 13 as the latest OpenJDK release.

3. Spring Persistence With Maven

Let's now look at the persistence Spring dependencies – mainly spring-orm:

<dependency> <groupId>org.springframework</groupId> <artifactId>spring-orm</artifactId> <version>${org.springframework.version}</version> </dependency>

This comes with Hibernate and JPA support – such as HibernateTemplate and JpaTemplate – as well as a few additional, persistence related dependencies: spring-jdbc and spring-tx.

The JDBC Data Access library defines the Spring JDBC support as well as the JdbcTemplate, and spring-tx represents the extremely flexible Transaction Management Abstraction.

4. Spring MVC With Maven

To use the Spring Web and Servlet support, two dependencies need to be included in the pom, again in addition to the core dependencies from above:

<dependency> <groupId>org.springframework</groupId> <artifactId>spring-web</artifactId> <version>${org.springframework.version}</version> </dependency> <dependency> <groupId>org.springframework</groupId> <artifactId>spring-webmvc</artifactId> <version>${org.springframework.version}</version> </dependency>

The spring-web dependency contains common web specific utilities for both Servlet and Portlet environments, while spring-webmvc enables the MVC support for Servlet environments.

Since spring-webmvc has spring-web as a dependency, explicitly defining spring-web is not required when using spring-webmvc.

Starting Spring 5.0, for the reactive-stack web framework support, we can add the dependency for Spring WebFlux:

<dependency> <groupId>org.springframework</groupId> <artifactId>spring-webflux</artifactId> <version>${org.springframework.version}</version> </dependency>

5. Spring Security With Maven

Security Maven dependencies are discussed in depth in the Spring Security with Maven article.

6. Spring Test With Maven

The Spring Test Framework can be included in the project via the following dependency:

<dependency> <groupId>org.springframework</groupId> <artifactId>spring-test</artifactId> <version>${spring.version}</version> <scope>test</scope> </dependency>

With Spring 5, we can perform concurrent test execution as well.

7. Using Milestones

The release version of Spring is hosted on Maven Central. However, if a project needs to use milestone versions, then a custom Spring repository needs to be added to the pom:

<repositories> <repository> <id>repository.springframework.maven.milestone</id> <name>Spring Framework Maven Milestone Repository</name> <url>http://repo.spring.io/milestone/</url> </repository> </repositories>

Once this repository has been defined, the project can define dependencies such as:

<dependency> <groupId>org.springframework</groupId> <artifactId>spring-core</artifactId> <version>5.3.0-M1</version> </dependency>

8. Using Snapshots

Similar to milestones, snapshots are hosted in a custom repository:

<repositories> <repository> <id>repository.springframework.maven.snapshot</id> <name>Spring Framework Maven Snapshot Repository</name> <url>http://repo.spring.io/snapshot/</url> </repository> </repositories>

Once the SNAPSHOT repository is enabled in the pom.xml, the following dependencies can be referenced:

<dependency> <groupId>org.springframework</groupId> <artifactId>spring-core</artifactId> <version>4.0.3.BUILD-SNAPSHOT</version> </dependency>

As well as – for 5.x:

<dependency> <groupId>org.springframework</groupId> <artifactId>spring-core</artifactId> <version>5.3.0-SNAPSHOT</version> </dependency>

9. Conclusion

This article discusses the practical details of using Spring with Maven. The Maven dependencies presented here are of course some of the major ones, and several others may be worth mentioning and have not yet made the cut. Nevertheless, this should be a good starting point for using Spring in a project.