Build a Rest Server in under 5 minutes with Spring Boot

Today, we will be creating a rest server using Spring Boot in under 5 minutes.

To get started head on to

start.spring.io

In our starter project we will need the following dependencies:

1. Spring Web
2. Spring Data JPA
3. Rest Repositories
4. H2 Database (In memory database)

It should look like:

Now, we import the project into our IDE, in my case I am using IntelliJ .

Your imported project will look something like this:

Lets create a Entity object which is basically a Table in your Database. In a file called main/java/com/awale/restserver/entity/Player.java

import javax.persistence.*;

@Entity
@Table(name="players")
public class Player {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
    private Long id;
    private String firstName;
    private String lastName;
    private String position;
    private String team;

    // Include Getters and setters
}

Now we need something that will handle the database connections, sql statements and everything related to persistence. This will be done by our PlayerRepository which will extend a JPARepository which does the actual magic.

In file main/repository/PlayerRepository.java

import org.springframework.data.jpa.repository.JpaRepository;
@Repository
public interface PlayerRepository extends JpaRepository<Player, Long> {
}

This is all the code that is required to expose our Player entity to our rest server. We just have to add in a few configurations according to the database we are using. Since we are using an H2 database, we configure it as follows.

In main/resources/application.properties

spring.h2.console.enabled=true  // console acts like a db manager 
spring.h2.console.path=/h2
spring.datasource.url=jdbc:h2:mem:item

Since we are using a H2 database which is an in memory database we will add some db statements that insert data to test our rest server.

In main/resources/data.sql

INSERT Into Players (first_name,last_name,position,team) values ('Ram','Daniel', 'Striker', 'AFC');
INSERT Into Players (first_name,last_name,position,team) values ('Rob','Bott', 'Striker', 'AFC');
INSERT Into Players (first_name,last_name,position,team) values ('Trevor','Carry', 'Striker', 'AFC');
INSERT Into Players (first_name,last_name,position,team) values ('Trad','Daniel', 'Striker', 'AFC');

And this is it. You can run the application and test your rest server at localhost:8080/players

Thank you for reading. Please hit the like button if you found this useful.

The video guide is present below.