spring-boot_skill

Overview

This skill provides a concise, practical guide to building production-ready applications with Spring Boot 3.x. It highlights core patterns for dependency injection, REST APIs, data access, security, and actuator monitoring. Use it to bootstrap projects, enforce architecture conventions, and speed development with tested idioms.

How this skill works

The skill inspects and surfaces common Spring Boot patterns: application setup, controller/service/repository layers, entity mapping, configuration properties, and actuator integration. It explains typical code snippets, recommended annotations, and configuration examples (application.yml, profiles). It also outlines transaction handling, validation, exception handling, and JPA repository techniques for common CRUD and search scenarios.

When to use it

• Starting a new Java microservice or monolith targeting Java 17+
• Scaffolding REST APIs with standard request/response and validation
• Implementing data access using Spring Data JPA and pagination
• Adding production features: health checks, metrics, and actuator endpoints
• Standardizing configuration and profile-specific behavior across environments

Best practices

• Prefer constructor injection and final fields for testable services
• Keep transactions read-only by default and annotate write methods with @Transactional
• Use DTOs for API boundaries and validation annotations on request objects
• Expose only necessary actuator endpoints and secure them in production
• Use profile-specific configuration files and environment variables for secrets

Example use cases

• Bootstrap a user management microservice with CRUD endpoints, validation, and pagination
• Add JWT authentication using configuration properties and a JwtService utility
• Create scheduled maintenance tasks and a repository method to deactivate inactive users
• Instrument apps with actuator and Prometheus metrics for production monitoring
• Migrate a legacy DAO layer to Spring Data JPA with repository interfaces and derived queries