Spring Boot version versus Spring Framework version?

Question

Given that you know the Spring Boot version used by an application, how do you find the underlying Spring (Framework) version?

Suppose you're the user of a Spring Boot application. The application log shows the Spring Boot version.

The application uses some Spring features that depend on the underlying Spring version. For example, Spring Expression Language (SpEL). To view the relevant version-specific docs for SpEL, you need to know the Spring version. Here's the URL for the SpEL docs for Spring 5.3.18:

https://docs.spring.io/spring-framework/docs/5.3.18/reference/html/core.html#expressions

How does the user of a Spring Boot application know which version of the Spring (Framework) docs to look at?

One person has told me that, as far as they know, "SpEL is stable", and so, the specific Spring version is not that significant. Still, the fact remains: the SpEL docs are Spring-version-specific. I'd like to view the docs that match the Spring version of the app. But perhaps I should have picked a different example Spring feature.

Am I missing something?

Examples of content that occurs to me might exist, and that I've looked for, but not found:

• In the Spring Boot docs, is there a formatted HTML table that maps Spring Boot versions to Spring Framework versions?
• In the docs for each version of Spring Boot, is there a link to the docs for the corresponding version of Spring? That is, do the Spring Boot 2.6.6 docs contain a link to the Spring 5.3.18 docs?

Answer 1

Here is a quick way to find which version of spring-core is used.

Google “spring-boot-starter-test”.

Click on the first link that comes back - spring-boot-starter-test on mvnrepository

Click in the version of interest, eg 2.6.6

Find the spring-core dependency: 5.3.18

Answer 2

Spring-Boot vs Spring-Framework

• 3.1.2 -> 6.0.11 Spring-Boot-3.1-Release-Notes
• 2.7.14 -> 5.3.29 Spring-Boot-3.0-Release-Notes
• 2.6.15 -> 5.3.27 Spring-Boot-2.7-Release-Notes
• 2.5.15 -> 5.3.27 Spring-Boot-2.6-Release-Notes
• 2.4.13 -> 5.3.13 Spring-Boot-2.4-Release-Notes
• 2.3.12.RELEASE -> 5.2.15.RELEASE
• 2.3.6.RELEASE -> 5.2.11.RELEASE

cf: mvnrepository.com cf: release notes cf: Spring-Boot-Older-Release-Notes

JDK Version Range Spring Framework 6.2.x: JDK 17-25 (expected) Spring Framework 6.1.x: JDK 17-23 Spring Framework 6.0.x: JDK 17-21 Spring Framework 5.3.x: JDK 8-21 (as of 5.3.26)

cf: github.com/spring-projects