Using the Plugin

Maven users can inherit from the spring-boot-starter-parent project to obtain sensible defaults. The parent project provides the following features:

Java 17 as the default compiler level.
UTF-8 source encoding.
Compilation with -parameters.
A dependency management section, inherited from the spring-boot-dependencies POM, that manages the versions of common dependencies. This dependency management lets you omit <version> tags for those dependencies when used in your own POM.
An execution of the repackage goal with a repackage execution id.
A native profile that configures the build to be able to generate a Native image.
Sensible resource filtering.
Sensible plugin configuration (Git commit ID, and shade).
Sensible resource filtering for application.properties and application.yml including profile-specific files (for example, application-dev.properties and application-dev.yml)

Since the application.properties and application.yml files accept Spring style placeholders (${…}), the Maven filtering is changed to use @..@ placeholders. (You can override that by setting a Maven property called resource.delimiter.)

The spring-boot-starter-parent sets the maven.compiler.release property, which restricts the --add-exports, --add-reads, and --patch-module options if they modify system modules. In case you need to use those options, unset maven.compiler.release:

<maven.compiler.release></maven.compiler.release>

and then configure the source and the target options instead:

<maven.compiler.source>${java.version}</maven.compiler.source>
<maven.compiler.target>${java.version}</maven.compiler.target>

Inheriting the Starter Parent POM

To configure your project to inherit from the spring-boot-starter-parent, set the parent as follows:

<!-- Inherit defaults from Spring Boot -->
<parent>
	<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
	<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
	<version>3.4.1</version>
</parent>

You should need to specify only the Spring Boot version number on this dependency. If you import additional starters, you can safely omit the version number.

With that setup, you can also override individual dependencies by overriding a property in your own project. For instance, to use a different version of the SLF4J library and the Spring Data release train, you would add the following to your pom.xml:

<properties>
	<slf4j.version>1.7.30</slf4j.version>
	<spring-data-releasetrain.version>Moore-SR6</spring-data-releasetrain.version>
</properties>

Browse the Dependency Versions Properties section in the Spring Boot reference for a complete list of dependency version properties.

Using Spring Boot without the Parent POM

There may be reasons for you not to inherit from the spring-boot-starter-parent POM. You may have your own corporate standard parent that you need to use or you may prefer to explicitly declare all your Maven configuration.

If you do not want to use the spring-boot-starter-parent, you can still keep the benefit of the dependency management (but not the plugin management) by using an import scoped dependency, as follows:

<dependencyManagement>
	<dependencies>
		<dependency>
			<!-- Import dependency management from Spring Boot -->
			<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-boot-dependencies</artifactId>
			<version>3.4.1</version>
			<type>pom</type>
			<scope>import</scope>
		</dependency>
	</dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

The preceding sample setup does not let you override individual dependencies by using properties, as explained above. To achieve the same result, you need to add entries in the dependencyManagement section of your project before the spring-boot-dependencies entry. For instance, to use a different version of the SLF4J library and the Spring Data release train, you could add the following elements to your pom.xml:

<dependencyManagement>
	<dependencies>
		<!-- Override SLF4J provided by Spring Boot -->
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
			<artifactId>slf4j-api</artifactId>
			<version>1.7.30</version>
		</dependency>
		<!-- Override Spring Data release train provided by Spring Boot -->
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.springframework.data</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-data-releasetrain</artifactId>
			<version>2020.0.0-SR1</version>
			<type>pom</type>
			<scope>import</scope>
		</dependency>
		<dependency>
			<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
			<artifactId>spring-boot-dependencies</artifactId>
			<version>3.4.1</version>
			<type>pom</type>
			<scope>import</scope>
		</dependency>
	</dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>

Overriding Settings on the Command Line

The plugin offers a number of user properties, starting with spring-boot, to let you customize the configuration from the command line.

For instance, you could tune the profiles to enable when running the application as follows:

$ mvn spring-boot:run -Dspring-boot.run.profiles=dev,local

If you want to both have a default while allowing it to be overridden on the command line, you should use a combination of a user-provided project property and MOJO configuration.

<project>
	<properties>
		<app.profiles>local,dev</app.profiles>
	</properties>
	<build>
		<plugins>
			<plugin>
				<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
				<artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
				<configuration>
					<profiles>${app.profiles}</profiles>
				</configuration>
			</plugin>
		</plugins>
	</build>
</project>

The above makes sure that local and dev are enabled by default. Now a dedicated property has been exposed, this can be overridden on the command line as well:

$ mvn spring-boot:run -Dapp.profiles=test