This section provides a brief overview of Spring Cloud Contract reference documentation. It serves as a map for the rest of the document.

1. About the Documentation

The Spring Cloud Contract reference guide is available as

Copies of this document may be made for your own use and for distribution to others, provided that you do not charge any fee for such copies and further provided that each copy contains this Copyright Notice, whether distributed in print or electronically.

2. Getting Help

If you have trouble with Spring Cloud Contract, we would like to help.

All of Spring Cloud Contract is open source, including the documentation. If you find problems with the docs or if you want to improve them, please get involved.

3. First Steps

If you are getting started with Spring Cloud Contract or 'Spring' in general, start with the following topics:

4. Working with Spring Cloud Contract

Ready to actually start using Spring Cloud Contract? We have you covered:

We talk about Provider Contracts when it is the producer of the API that defines the contracts and publishes it for all its consumers to use. This approach is useful for producers that cannot directly collaborate with their consumers — for example, when there are too many consumers or the consumers are external (do not work within the same company).
We use the term, Consumer-Driven Contracts, to refer to workflows where the consumers of an API play a vital role in the process of creating the contracts. We recommended this approach, because it is easy to implement when both producer and consumer teams work for the same organizations and the number of consumers is not extremely large.

5. Learning about Spring Cloud Contract Features

Need more details about Spring Cloud Contract’s core features? The following content is for you:

6. Advanced Topics

Finally, we have a few topics for more advanced users: