SivaLabs

We can use Intellij IDEA Community Edition for working with SpringBoot applications as we don’t need support for configuring servers like Tomcat, Wildlfy etc and can simply run the applications by running main() method.

However, there is no provision in Intellij IDEA Community Edition to create SpringBoot application directly, the way it supports in Ultimate Edition.

We can go to http://start.spring.io/ and generate the project and then import into our IDE. But it would be nice to be able to create the SpringBoot project from IDE itself.

One simple alternative I found to circumvent this problem is by using Project Template support in IntellijIDEA.

For the first time you can create the SpringBoot project from http://start.spring.io/ and import it into Intellij IDE.

If you wish you can add any other starters that you commonly use, configure properties like JDBC parameters etc.

Now click on menu Tools -> Save Project as Template. Enter Name and Description for the template.

Once the template is created we can use that template while creating new projects.

Select File -> New -> Project.

In the New Project Dialog, you can see User-defined section and when you click on User-defined you can see all the project templates we created.

Select the SpringBootBasic template we created earlier and provide the project name and click Finish.

Well, we won’t get any fancy Spring support features like Ultimate Edition provides, but it will help us to get started quickly without requiring us to manually create Maven/Gradle project, configure etc etc.

Of course, it is not specific to SpringBoot only, we can create templates for any of our favorite tech stacks.

Happy coding 🙂