Welcome to part two of my blog series on writing a habit tracker! In part one, I described the project and set up some tools on my server where I eventually hope to deploy this. Today I’ll create a skeleton Spring Boot app.

Creating a Spring Boot app

Allright! So let’s create a Spring Boot app for the backend of my habit tracker. I have never done much in Spring Boot, besides some other simple example apps like this one, so this is a project about me learning it. I’m going to Spring Initializr, and this is my basic setup:

  • Gradle (Groovy) as the build system, since that’s what I’m used to.
  • Java 19 as implementation language. (Some day I will write my thoughts about the relative merits of Java and Kotlin, but not today1.)
  • Packaging it as a Jar because what is even a “War”?!

Then it’s the dependencies section. I’m going with the following as a start:

  • Spring Web. For building HTTP endpoints.
  • Spring Security. I will want to protect the endpoints.
  • Spring Data JDBC. This choice is a bit random, and I may change it later, but it seems like a good choice – getting some nice and simple repositories without having to deal with JPA just yet.
  • Flyway Migration. Because I want to control my migrations, and I have some experience with Flyway.
  • PostgreSQL Driver.
  • Testcontainers - would probably be good enough for this project to just use H2 repositories for testing, but I like Testcontainers.

Great, now we just press “Generate” and have ourselves a little skeleton app! But does it run…?

That’ll be the cliffhanger for today’s post – today I’m going to sit all day in a car, driving home from the ski resort. But I expect to pause somewhere to charge the car, and then I hope to get my 30 minutes of outdoors.

Continue reading part three.

Notes

  1. I realized I did write something along the lines of what I had in mind here back in 2020, read here! ↩