Spring Boot starters are curated dependency bundles that pull in everything needed for a specific capability along with sensible auto-configuration, and a handful of them appear in nearly every Spring Boot project.
Key Points: • spring-boot-starter-web brings in Spring MVC and an embedded Tomcat server for building REST APIs and web applications. • spring-boot-starter-data-jpa provides Spring Data JPA and Hibernate for relational database access. • spring-boot-starter-security adds authentication and authorization support out of the box. • spring-boot-starter-test bundles JUnit, Mockito, and Spring Test utilities for writing tests. • spring-boot-starter-actuator exposes production-ready monitoring and management endpoints.
Example: A typical CRUD REST API project depends on spring-boot-starter-web for the HTTP layer, spring-boot-starter-data-jpa for persistence, and spring-boot-starter-test for testing, without needing to manually manage the individual library versions each one pulls in.
Interview Tip: A concise interview answer is:
"Some of the most common starters are spring-boot-starter-web for building REST APIs with an embedded Tomcat, spring-boot-starter-data-jpa for database access through Spring Data and Hibernate, spring-boot-starter-security for authentication, and spring-boot-starter-actuator for monitoring endpoints. They bundle the right dependencies and auto-configuration so I don't manage versions manually."