The easiest ways to setup a Spring Boot project with Maven is to define spring-boot-starter-parent as the project’s parent in you POM file:
<project ...>
<parent>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
<version>2.3.4.RELEASE</version>
</parent>
...
This way, you will inherit some useful dependencies and other definitions.
But there are situations when you need to use a different parent, for example if your Spring Boot project is supposed to be a sub-module in a larger project.
In this case, you can still import the above mentioned dependencies by adding spring-boot-dependencies as a dependency in the <dependencyManagement> section of your POM file:
<dependencyManagement>
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-dependencies</artifactId>
<version>2.3.4.RELEASE</version>
<type>pom</type>
<scope>import</scope>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>
But you will find that your integration tests, usually managed by the Maven Failsafe plugin, will now fail with an error:
Unable to find a @SpringBootConfiguration
To resolve this, you need to add the following <classesDirectory> configuration to the Failsafe plugin definition in your POM file:
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-failsafe-plugin</artifactId>
<version>2.22.2</version>
<executions>
<execution>
<goals>
<goal>integration-test</goal>
<goal>verify</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
<configuration>
<classesDirectory>${project.build.outputDirectory}</classesDirectory>
</configuration>
</plugin>
You can confirm that this definition is in fact part of the spring-boot-starter-parent‘s POM by looking into it!