You can also generate a project in a shell using cURL or HTTPie. To discover the available options of a particular instance, simply "curl it", i.e. if you have curl installed invoke curl start.spring.io on the command-line (or alternatively http start.spring.io if you prefer to use HTTPie).

The result is a textual representation of the capabilities of the service that are split in three sections:

First, a table that describes the available project’s types. On the default instance, you’ll find the maven-project and gradle-project we’ve discussed above but you’ll also be able to generate only a build script rather than an entire project.

Then, a table that describes the available parameters. For the most part, these are the same options as the ones available in the web UI. There are, however, a few additional ones:

Finally, the list of dependencies are defined. Each entry provides the identifier that you’ll have to use if you want to select the dependency, a description and the Spring Boot version range, if any.

Alongside the capabilities of the service, you’ll also find a few examples that help you understand how you can generate a project. These are obviously tailored to the client that you are using.

Let’s assume that you want to generate a "my-project.zip" project based on Spring Boot 1.5.2.RELEASE, using the web and devtools dependencies (remember, those two ids are displayed in the capabilities of the service):

$ curl https://start.spring.io/starter.zip -d dependencies=web,devtools \
           -d bootVersion=1.5.2.RELEASE -o my-project.zip

If you extract my-project.zip, you’ll notice a few differences compared to what happens with the web UI:

The exact same project can be generated using the http command as well:

$ http https://start.spring.io/starter.zip dependencies==web,devtools \
           bootVersion==1.5.1.RELEASE -d

	Note
	HTTPie reads the same hint as the browser so it will store a demo.zip file in the current directory, with the same differences discussed above.