Can I use Spring Boot Starters just for dependency management?

Question

Well, I was seeing Spring IO Platform for versioned management of my dependencies, then I went into the sources, as far I see it uses Spring Boot POMs under the hoods. So after that I was wondering, can I use the starters, since it's just POMs to shortcut the dependency declaration ?

Answer 1

Yes, you can use the starters.

Because I just want the poms, not the autoconfigure from Boot
Then do not use @EnableAutoConfiguration, see JavaDoc and Reference.

Because I just want the poms, not the embedded servlet container
Then do not use the spring-boot-starter-web starter, see the list of Starter POMs.

If you need Spring MVC, then you have to declare the dependency or you use spring-boot-starter-web but without Tomcat, see e.g. spring boot war without tomcat embedded