Spring Boot — Create the Project (Initializr)

The easiest way to create the project is the official Spring Initializr — it scaffolds the whole thing.

Steps

1. Open https://start.spring.io.
2. Set the options exactly like this:
   • Project = Maven
   • Language = Java
   • Spring Boot = leave the default (a 3.x version)
   • Group = com.example
   • Artifact = myapp (this becomes the project name)
   • Name = myapp
   • Packaging = Jar
   • Java = 17 (or whichever JDK you have installed)
3. Click ADD DEPENDENCIES (top right) and add these four:
   • Spring Web
   • Spring Data JPA
   • Rest Repositories
   • MySQL Driver
4. Click GENERATE — a .zip downloads. Unzip it.
5. Open the unzipped folder in your IDE (IntelliJ IDEA, or Eclipse / VS Code with Spring support).

Adding the dependencies here writes them straight into pom.xml — no manual editing needed afterwards.

Next: [[spring-boot-mysql-setup]]. Overview: [[spring-boot-basics]].