What's the difference between spring-boot:run and spring-boot:start

Question

What's the difference between spring-boot:run and spring-boot:start?

I see both them being available as Maven goals.

But what's the difference?

Answer 1

To understand the difference, compare mvn clean spring-boot:run with mvn clean spring-boot:start

In the first case Spring Boot Maven Plugin will execute all required Maven goals and then start your application.

mvn clean spring-boot:run
[INFO] --- clean:3.4.0:clean (default-clean)
[INFO] --- resources:3.3.1:resources (default-resources)
[INFO] --- compiler:3.13.0:compile (default-compile)
[INFO] --- resources:3.3.1:testResources (default-testResources)
[INFO] --- compiler:3.13.0:testCompile (default-testCompile)
[INFO] --- spring-boot:3.4.2:run (default-cli)

In the second case you'll end up with

Unable to find a suitable main class, please add a 'mainClass' property

because the compile phase has not been executed.

After mvn compile it will work and launch your app in background - not blocking the console, so to stop it you will need to explicitly run

mvn spring-boot:stop

intstead of Ctl+C

Answer 2

From the documentation:

spring-boot:run runs your Spring Boot application.

spring-boot:start [..] Start a spring application. Contrary to the run goal, this does not block and allows other goal to operate on the application. This goal is typically used in integration test scenario where the application is started before a test suite and stopped after.

Answer 3

spring-boot:run

Description:

Run an executable archive application.

---

spring-boot:start

Description:

Start a spring application. Contrary to the run goal, this does not block and allows other goal to operate on the application. This goal is typically used in integration test scenario where the application is started before a test suite and stopped after.

the info is right here:

http://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/maven-plugin/index.html