Writing a habit tracker, part 2: A skeleton Spring Boot app
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.